It’s been a while since I’ve shown my face around here.

I’m trying to stay off Substack Notes, where I inevitably end up feeling anxious about the rate at which everyone else seems to produce things.

Instead, I’ve been in the kitchen, cooking away. Concentrating on producing more myself.

It feels healthy. It’s working.

The problem is, I’m cooking so much that I’m starting to wonder about what to include and what to leave out of this rich decision buffet.

I don’t know whether it’s anxiety about my artwork, but I find it much easier to put words out into the world than I do images. Particularly the one I’m sharing below.

This is the first page of a Seth Stanley story.

It’ll take you seconds to read and process something that’s taken me weeks to make, rip up, make all over again and finally present to you.

But that’s fine.

That’s the craft.

I’m comfortable with the process. I guess I’m just impatient to have a finished thing out in the world.

I’m tinkering endlessly at the margins, trying to make it perfect. But I really just have to push this out now.

Over the last month or so, I’ve created model sheets, firmed up what the characters look like and worked through key events in the story. Some I’ve already mentioned at length. Others, not at all.

I just wish I had some folks that could help me make the whole process go faster. Some fellow humans to share the workload. And bounce ideas around with.

But I don’t.

So, at this George R. R. Martin rate, expect completion sometime around 2047.

For now, though, I just have one question for you:

Does this page make you want to turn over? Let me know in the comments.

That’s all til next time, friends.
Johnson

This is an accessible transcript of the image above for folks who use screenreaders.

A four-panel comic page set on a rain-soaked skyscraper rooftop at night.

Panel 1, a small figure wearing a yellow hooded raincoat stands near the edge of the roof, looking out across a vast, illuminated city. Caption: “I lost my wife.”

Panel 2 looks down past the figure towards the streets far below, emphasising the dizzying height. Caption: “My kids. My home.”

Panel 3 shows a close-up of the figure’s frightened face beneath the hood. Caption: “This could be the only way to see them again.”

Panel 4 is completely black, with no text.

I think I’ve been talking about Seth Stanley too much.

Whaaaaaaaaat?

I know, I know, it’s a weird thing to say, considering there’s a part of my brain he never really leaves. This whole Substack is about him in one way or another.

I started writing here because I wanted to document the process of turning this character I’ve been carrying around for years into an actual story. And, hopefully, get some other people interested in him along the way.

So I’ve posted about Seth a lot, which seems like an entirely appropriate strategy - here’s a thing I’m trying to make, I’m not sure what it looks like yet, but let me tell you about the thing, as I’m doing it, in real-time, and if you get a fraction of the excitement about it that I feel, well, we’re both winners.

And yet, I’m not connecting with as many folks as I hoped I would by now. That is to say, Seth’s not connecting.

People don’t get it. No one likes him.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

I might get a like or two, occasionally a reply. Once, I even got a restack.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t live for validation from others. That’s not a good path to walk. But I do enjoy talking to other people about the things we’re making. I don’t want little hearts to make me feel good about myself - I want to share in the buzz of creating something out of nothing.

So, like many fellow artists or writers on Substack, I feel frustrated when I put time and energy into a Note - not even a post, a Note - to be mostly met with static, when Substack growth guy gets 100 comments on a picture of a sunset.

For right or wrong, I think what I make is good. I made it, why wouldn’t I think that?

So I didn’t feel sorry for myself - instead, I wondered if Substack was broken, or that the inverted comma fingers algorithm end inverted comma fingers was somehow holding me back.

And then I did what no sane, emotionally well-adjusted grown up should do.

Yes.

I looked at my Substack statistics.

And what I found may, to you, be extremely common sensical. But to me, well, let’s say it’s been something of a lightbulb moment.

Don’t panic - I’m not about to turn into that Substack growth guy who asks “what’s the biggest problem you couldn’t get past this week?”.

Honestly? Don’t care.

But I did some analysis, and I found some genuinely interesting things about my Substack Notes. If you’re feeling some of the same frustrations I am about the radio silence you can encounter on Substack, you might find them interesting too.

I have over 2,100 followers. I imagined every time I spake forth from Substack Notes, that it was landing neatly in each of those follower’s feeds, and then receiving absolute crickets.

But it turns out that’s not entirely true.

Finding #1: Low response does not equal rejection by entire follower group

I went back through the stats for 24 of my Substack Notes, posted roughly over 3 months - 10 June to 28 August 2026.

One Note I’d spent time writing, drawing and then confidently firing towards my 2,100 followers actually received 37 impressions.

Not 37 likes. Not 37 comments.

37 impressions.

Which, if nothing else, meant approximately 2,063 people hadn’t rejected it at all. They’d apparently never been given the opportunity to.

And this wasn’t an outlier.

Of the 24 Notes I looked at, lots of them had received 30, 40 or 50 impressions. Suddenly, the radio silence made a little more sense. They just weren’t being seen by many people. They were barely being seen outside of my computer screen. Which made me feel a little better about things, not gonna lie.

Finding #2: Seth Stanley is not the problem

When I looked at what was happening within those tiny audiences, some Seth Notes actually got a decent response.

• Stay Puft Seth: 37 impressions → 5 interactions

• Father Karras Seth: 64 impressions → 7 interactions

• Florida/Seth: 37 impressions → 6 interactions

So people don’t seem to hate Seth after all.

Thank God. What a waste of 15 years of thinking that would have been.

Finding #3: More interaction doesn’t necessarily mean more reach

That led me to another assumption.

Maybe Substack shows a Note to a few people, sees what they make of it, and if enough of them interact with it, opens the floodgate a little wider?

That would make sense.

Except...

This got a decent reaction compared to initial distribution. But it didn’t get the bump of extra distribution my assumption would expect.

If response isn’t enough to explain distribution, what is?

Hold the phone!

Holy Substacks, Batman - what’s this?

Finding #4: My biggest reach came from sharing someone else’s work

There was actually one enormous outlier.

It wasn’t about Seth. It wasn’t really about me.

A Note I posted linking to ’s piece about Labubus received 430 impressions. 384 of them came from people who weren’t connected to me.

Which sounds significant, except it wasn’t really the same experiment. I was linking to another writer’s Substack post, so there were other possible routes into it that my normal Notes didn’t have.

I can’t conclude from one Note that Substack rewards you for sharing other people’s work. I don’t know why it travelled so much further.

But it did make me notice something I’d been getting wrong. I’d been thinking about Substack almost entirely as a place where I put my thing in front of other people.

This Note wasn’t doing that at all. I was talking about something someone else had made, adding my own stupid observation, and joining a conversation that already existed.

So I put that one to one side.

Finding #5: Give people an easy way in

It did give me another question, though.

Was its reach because I’d linked to another Substack post? Was it because Labubus were a recognisable subject? Was it because people enjoy stories about the destruction of children’s property?

I know I do.

And then I found another Note that had travelled significantly further than most of mine.

147 impressions.

91 of them from people who weren’t connected to me.

Seven interactions.

Compared with almost everything else I’d posted, this thing had escaped faster than an Anthropic agent.

You didn't need to know me to answer the film quote question. You didn't need to know Seth. If you're the kind of person who quotes films around the house, you probably had an answer before you'd finished reading the Note.

Look at this one:

• The 147 impression Note started with movies.

• The 79 impression Note started with casting.

Neither of those asked a stranger to understand who Seth Stanley was.

But both were about things that I find interesting.

I’d been using the door the wrong way round.

I’d been using Seth to introduce people to my interests.

Perhaps I should sometimes use my interests to introduce people to Seth.

A lightbulb moment? More like a Kobayashi mug break moment.

I don’t have to be “the guy who writes about Seth Stanley” all the time. I don’t have to funnel everything through the project to reach the people I want to connect with about the project.

I can break character. I should break character.

I can talk about:

• films without explaining their relevance to Seth

• drawing without showing Seth

• being creative at 48 without making it about finishing Seth’s story

• a stupid thing that happened on vacation without turning it into Seth research

• a movie observation without converting it into a cultural-anchor theory

I’m still going to talk about Seth. A lot. Sometimes directly.

But from now on, I won’t think twice about letting you peek behind the curtain to talk about the films, humour, obsessions, experiences and creative anxieties that made him possible.

That’s all til next time friends.

As ever, if you’re following along, come and say hello - it’s good to know there are folks out there on the other side of the screen.

If you tune in regularly

and I hope you do, I don’t like new people coming,

you’ll know I’ve been carrying round the idea of Seth Stanley getting punched in the face by Harrison Ford for a long time. It was a real flash of inspiration thing that I found funny and then just hung on to for years.

I liked the idea that Seth had smart-mouthed Ford

or HF, as I know him. Yeah, HF.

who was known to be of a grumpy disposition, and HF had punched him into a working trash compactor.

Seth died. Sad face emoji.

This could have catastrophic repercussions like:

• HF was fired

• Tom Selleck was hired as Han Solo instead

• HF carried on being a carpenter

• Earth careered towards an extinction level event

Because I had the scene in my head without any rhyme or reason as to why the scene had happened, I needed to reverse-engineer a story out of it.

I guess the point about Earth becoming extinct requires some kind of unpacking, doesn’t it? It’s quite the escalation.

Well, you may have noticed I’ve become slightly obsessed by the idea of films becoming cultural anchors.

What do I mean by that?

Films that become so embedded in our culture that they influence what comes afterwards. Other films. Careers. Technology. Fashion. Language.

The people who watch them are inspired to be pilots, astronauts, scientists, musicians. As well as actors, directors and movie-makers who inspire the next generation.

And so on.

So what if you could alter a cultural anchor?

Could one small Sliding Doors (NOT the movie) moment in a film eventually have a global impact?

I liked the idea that under the right conditions, a piece of alternative casting could undo a career and a whole movie family tree with a spaghetti of causality that butterfly-effects itself all the way to Armageddon.

Also NOT the movie.

Walk this through with me and see what happens when I break Star Wars.

HF gets fired. Tom Selleck gets hired. Selleck’s a great person to what-if with because he was almost Han Solo for real. He was almost Indiana Jones too.

So we can use real-life near-casting to see what happens, and make some really wild claims about the end impact. It only needs to hold up enough to tell a story. I’m not writing a science paper here.

HF

HF throws the towel in on acting after the unfortunate death of Seth Stanley on the set of Star Wars.

He goes back to being a carpenter. He opens up a workshop called Ford Furniture Designs.

Tom Selleck
Becomes Han Solo
Becomes Indiana Jones
It doesn’t go so well. No one wants a sequel. Only Steven Spielberg.

So what doesn’t happen?

No Magnum P.I cos Selleck can’t drive a Ferrari AND the Millenium Falcon.

So someone else becomes Magnum. Who? Erm… Simon MacCorkindale from TV’s Manimal.

Ewww.

It doesn’t go down very well.

And Richard from Friends?

Poor Richard, he never stood a chance.

Bet he didn’t see that coming.

Selleck is a good Han Solo, but not great. The chemistry’s just that little bit off. And because there’s no HF - folks just don’t like it as much.

So Star Wars, like Luke’s X-Wing Fighter in Empire Strikes Back, sank.

Which means little Thurston Smith from Missouri, doesn’t get to see the trilogy at the Star Cinema Grill.

Thurston doesn’t grow up obsessed with Tie Fighters, and science fiction.

Thurston doesn’t become a scientist, involved with agricultural engineers.

Thurston doesn’t invent a Tie Fighter-inspired crop-sprayer design that saves the world from a global famine caused by a terrorism-generated bio-locust.

Thurston dies. Everybody dies.

…

But not in our reality, so everything’s ok!

What’s that? It’s NOT ok?

Why? What does it matter?

Well I guess that’s the next bit I need to figure out.

That’s all til next time folks.

As ever, if you’re following along, come and say hello - it’s good to know there are folks out there on the other side of the screen.

The dramatic tension in the best films is rarely about avoiding death.

Death is coming for us all. It’s the spoiler we definitely can’t avoid.

But if your face is on the poster, you’re typically the hero of the story and you usually live.

Unless you’re Drew Barrymore.

The tension, the stakes, are about what life can take away.

Identity.

Purpose.

The people we love.

The memories that define us.

Family.

Me, Jack Black and Paul Rudd, all together now: Themes.

Marty McFly isn’t avoiding death - he’s helping his parents fall in love.

Woody isn’t avoiding death - he’s trying not to become obsolete.

Indiana Jones isn’t avoiding death - he’s stopping history falling into the wrong hands.

I had Seth, someone who could die on command. I could blow him up, boil him in lava, feed him to sharks, or jump him off a cliff.

It’s funny and all, but why is he there, doing those things?

I had a movie set accident at New Dimension Pictures to explain how he got this unusual power.

What’s the power for?

There was still an element of OK, so what?

And then I thought - what if when he dies, he re-appears in another dimension? So, he’s far away from home. Far away from his life. On the surface, the power is awesome, he’s immortal. But he’s immortal somewhere else….

He could still be at home, but it’s not HIS home.

Not his life.

Wow. What if he did things in another dimension, that impacted things in his home dimension?

Wouldn’t that be cool?

And that made me think about what Seth is doing in between the images. Who is he at home with? How does he spend his downtime? Who does he hang out with?

Lots of thoughts at once. None of them coherent.

I'm presenting them in a linear fashion cos that's how writing works. If it feels like a story, you can interpret it in a way that makes sense to you.

For me, it was more like tipping a bucket of Lego onto the floor.

The bricks started connecting in odd and interesting ways, not always one at a time.

I liked the idea of Seth having a family. A wife, and two daughters who resembled the twins from the Shining. It made me think they were twins, but they didn’t have to be.

I liked the idea of him having a sidekick friend. What can we call him?

What about Gabe Gorey - as a nod to Edward Gorey and the Gashlycrumb Tinies that helped me put a structure on the Movie Deaths output.

Family and a friend. The high stakes I needed. Now what?

How did that connect together with the A-Z of Movie Deaths?

I had the stakes, but I was (and still am) searching for the story…

So, these were the facts I had:

• Seth can die and still be alive

• When he dies, he shifts to another dimension

• He wants to find his way home

• Because his family and Gabe are there…

What do I do with all that? What’s Seth going to do for the rest of the story?

I looked at the 26 movie death images, desperately searching for clues. What if these weren’t merely funny images? What if they were evidence of Seth’s travels? What if he needed to put things right in movies in order to fix something?

And then I thought about the ideas I’d been having about Film’s place in society. How movies can be cultural anchors that influence the ebb and flow of society.

What if changing something seemingly insignificant in a movie could have consequences far beyond the movie itself?

Change the actor.

Change the film.

Change what that actor does next.

Change another film.

Keep going.

How far could the ripples spread?

What if, somewhere down the line, one tiny change could alter the future of an entire dimension?

Hmm. Interesting.

What if it the keystone was the image I’d been circling around: Harrison Ford being replaced by Tom Selleck as Han Solo in Star Wars?

What if it was Seth’s fault?

What if that led to a whole movie family-tree of knock-on effects that caused an extinction level event?

The story I was searching for was becoming clearer.

The high stakes were what Seth’s actions could take away:

• His world

• His family

• His history

• Potentially everyone else’s…

The pieces were coming together. Now - how do I get Seth to break Star Wars?

Hey - quick word?

If you’re reading along, feel free to let me know in the comments. Tell me what you like or don’t like. Whether you dig what I’m doing or don’t know what the hell I’m talking about - I’d love to say hi!

Tell me your favourite movie or movie death (or both)!

Til next time,

Johnson.

So, Seth can flit from movie death to movie death. Where does that ability come from?

Could it be magic?

No. This is NOT Harry Potter.

What about a superpower?

Hmmm. But not like Superman, where he just has it, like a privilege. It’s not earned.

What about Spiderman? An accident…

Yeah - but not in a science lab, it’s been done to death.

A movie set!

Why is Seth Stanley on a movie set?

He’s having a job interview! But not as a stuntman.

He’s there for something boring.

He’s going to be an admin bod!

So, he gets to New Dimension Pictures and he’s a little overwhelmed. It’s a big place, with tons going on. He’s nervous - there’s a lot riding on this. He needs a job!

So - here’s my first attempt to write up how this goes down. It’s some words explaining what happens and some dialogue…. so I guess a script of sorts.

And… action!

Seth opens the door and from the quiet outside is suddenly immersed in film studio chaos. People are talking across each other.

Studio exec: Can I get a pistachio latte with maple cream? Tall. Grande, whatever the biggest one is.

Studio exec 2: I’ll be in my office Thursday, but not Wednesday.

Studio exec 3: it’s the Tron sequel everyone wanted and didn’t get

Above the noise, someone shouts:

Runner: Stiffly? Stan Stiffly?

Seth: Meh. That sounds close enough. Yeah, right here.

Runner: Hmm, you look different to your photo, but whatever. Here’s your ID and your day rate form. Fill this in and hurry, you’re needed on set now.

Seth: is this a mistake? I’m here for an admin interview?

Runner: Steak? On this budget? You’re lucky to get a sandwich man. Now go! They’re waiting for you in costume!

Seth fills the form in

Seth: Ok, but this seems highly unusual…

Seth enters costume dept.

Seth: Uh, hey! Someone gave me this and told me to come here, I think I’m supposed to grab a costume and take it to someone.

Costume bod: Oh hey! You’re the guy! Just take a seat and we’ll get you sorted in a jiffy.

From behind racks of clothing and monster parts:

Costume bod: What size shoe are you?

Seth: Me? Umm, 8.5 I think? Why?

A pair of Frankenstein boot shoes are put down in front of Seth.

Costume bod: Why are you still dressed?

Seth: Um.

Costume bod: Come on, they’re waiting for you!

Make-up dude fusses over Seth.

Make-up dude: How’s the prosthetic?

Seth: I can’t feel my face.

Make-up dude: it’s not your face.

Seth: feels unnecessary for an admin interview

Make-up dude: Honey, I think you’ve been promoted.

Seth is in full Frankenstein monster gear.

Headset dude enters.

Headset dude: Steve Staffley? Is Steve Staffley here?

Seth (mumbling through his mask): Um that’s me. I think.

Headset dude: Great, I’m Rock Thompson. Stunt co-ordinator of Frankenstein In Pieces. Let me talk you through what’s about to happen.

Rock Thompson draws super-complicated play-by-play stunt diagram.

Rock Thompson: So, we’re going to strap you to the table. When we call action, we’re going to fire these industrial lasers at you to simulate a lightning strike. Electricity. Some science shit.

Seth: I thought I’d be filing today.

Rock Thompson: Hell no, we’re doing the falling stunts tomorrow.

Seth is being hoisted onto an altar.

Seth: Aren’t you going to CGI the lightning afterwards?

Rock Thompson: if it wasn’t practical effects, we wouldn’t need an expert stuntman like you

The lasers are being pointed. There are logos and words on the sides of the machines to suggest this is retro government equipment.

Seth: This is totally safe, right?

Rock Thompson: 70% -ish

Seth: But 30% not?

Rock Thompson: Don’t panic, they don’t call you “Safe” Stunley for nothing.

Seth: But I’m not....

Rock Thompson: Green is go

A director: ACTION!

Seth: ..... safe…

Lasers fire at Seth.

A director: and CUT!

The mist clears. Seth has gone.

End scene…

AND….CUT.

That one accident solved far more problems than I realised.

It explained:

• where Seth’s power came from

• elements of Seth’s character that would lead him to this situation

• why he kept turning up in different movies

• why his adventures always started on film sets

• how the A–Z of Movie Deaths could become one continuous story instead of twenty-six disconnected illustrations

I hadn’t intended to solve all of that in one scene.

I just wanted a decent origin story.

It also opened up some avenues to explore in terms of how the story could pan out (more on that later).

Just like that - Seth was speaking, and moving. Not in the Pixar sense, admittedly, but for the first time, I made words come out of his mouth.

And just as quickly…

dead.

I could hear the words he'd say. And see how easily he got himself into a situation where he died. Luckily for him, it was also the situation that made him immortal.

Seth could die and revive, infinitely. I hadn't yet worked out why that was a terrible thing. Turns out immortality is awesome for a character. It’s bad for a plot.

This isn’t Napoleon Dynamite.

When life isn’t yours to lose, what’s at stake?

I had to give Seth something else. And then find out what happens when I take it away…

Hey - quick word?

If you’re reading along, feel free to let me know in the comments. Tell me what you like or don’t like. Whether you dig what I’m doing or don’t know what the hell I’m talking about - I’d love to say hi!

Tell me your favourite movie or movie death (or both)!

Til next time,

Johnson.

In the Movie Deaths illustration series, I imagined that Seth Stanley was a stuntman. That he was inserted into the death scene right at the very last second, to stage the coup de grâce.

With hilarious consequences.

There’s no pay-off if he’s heroic. There’s no pay-off if he wants to be there. It only works when his expression says, “How did I get myself into this?”

If he can handle himself and the situation he finds himself in, where’s the humour in that? It’s funny because he’s about to die in an amusingly dramatic way - that’s how it works.

I decided that if he’s going to be a stuntman, he needs to become one by accident, not design.

And that’s when I started to think about who Seth Stanley really was.

If he’s enthusiastic, experienced and capable - there’s no joke. And no tension. You would never doubt he’d be able to complete a task.

But if you think he’s an ‘I’ll do it later’ kind of guy, unprepared for what comes next - it changes things. I didn’t want him to be a Homer Simpson-esque buffoon who often comes up trumps through his own ineptitude.

Homer’s been to space, you know?

Seth’s a fish out of water, traversing timelines, using only his smart mouth and his nerdy movie knowledge to get himself out of (or into) trouble.

He often has the upper hand because he knows how the films are supposed to turn out. He knows the behind-the-scenes stories. The production mishaps. The bits of movie trivia everyone else has forgotten.

That’s the skillset that helps him get by - not brute strength. He survives on his nerdy movie smarts.

But before I could give him the opportunity to show any of that...

...he had to get the job.

Worst. Interview. Ever.

So - how do you get to be an accidental stuntman?

Well, I liked the idea that Seth had gone for a job interview. As an admin dude.

Not a stuntman.

Why was he going for a job interview?

Because he needed a job! Maybe money was tight? Maybe Stella’s salary just wasn’t enough, and she was sick of him waiting for the ‘right job’?

Hmmm. Yeah. Maybe that’s it.

It puts him in a position of desperation. He’s anxious to support his family.

More on [them] later.

But who could he ask for a favour to get himself a job?

More on [him] later.

When he gets to New Dimension Pictures, he’s nervous, but he can’t fail.

How could I make Seth become a stuntman in this situation? How could it be funny?

I liked the idea of an escalation of mistaken identity. So, Seth might get to the studio and it’s really chaotic, no one’s paying great attention to him. A runner shouts a funny name that sounds like Seth Stanley but isn’t quite right.

He even notes Seth doesn’t look like his photo. Alarm bell #1. Seth could be dragged through a number of different situations where people call him by a similar but incorrect name, culminating in him being prepped in full costume and stuntman paraphernalia.

Names considered for escalation:

• Stan Stiffly

• Steve Staffly

• Safe Stunley

Safe Stunley? Ooh, that’s a real stuntman’s name, eh? Maybe I’ll come back to that in the future…

How do you become an accidental stuntman?

By being desperate, nervous, misheard, rushed, handed paperwork and dressed by people who are too busy to listen, and before anyone pauses long enough to ask who you actually are.

The next thing I knew, I had accidentally pushed my accidental stuntman towards an accident that accidentally answered a whole bunch of questions I hadn’t even thought to ask yet...

By accident.

Here’s the full Spielberg-style triptych image - first time I’ve attempted something resembling comic panels.

Hey - quick word?

If you’re reading any of my posts - feel free to let me know in the comments. Tell me what you like or don’t like. Whether you dig what I’m doing or don’t know what the hell I’m talking about - I’d love to say hi!

Tell me your favourite movie or movie death (or both)!

Til next time,
Johnson.

Firstly, this is the felt version of my Seth in the trash compactor image. What do you think? Is it worth the extra week of felty polish to the process? Or have I committed myself to something ridiculous for little return?

Secondly - I’m reflecting recently that my post titles may make me seem like a loon. But I promise there’s a method to the madness. I’m trying to tell a story about how I found a story, one question at a time, instead of dropping years of Seth Stanley lore on you all at once.

It’s just much much too much.

Cos, that’s just basically telling the story, isn’t it? And I don’t think I’ve found a complete, satisfying way to do that yet. There are still holes, gaping gaps, bits that don’t quite make sense.

But I’m genuinely getting a lot of pleasure writing about where these ideas sprung from and piecing them together as I try to figure out the endgame for all of this. I hope you are too…

When I landed on the idea that Seth Stanley wasn’t just dying in the Movie Death illustrations, but was there to change something - correct a blooper, alter a performance or make a death scene more convincing - one image refused to leave me alone.

A young, grumpy Harrison Ford punching Seth in the face on the set of Star Wars.

The punch sends Seth flying backwards into an unnecessarily functional trash compactor.

Seth dies.

Squish.

Ford gets fired.

The scene arrived fully formed. I just didn’t understand why.

So I kept pulling on the thread…

Why Harrison Ford?

Why Star Wars?

If Seth dies before completing his mission, what happens?

Does he accidentally ruin Star Wars?

And if Star Wars changes... what else changes with it?

Why Harrison Ford?

I mean, I like him a lot. Most days I’ll tell anyone who asks that Raiders of the Lost Ark is probably my favourite film.

But that’s not why I kept returning to him in this scene.

Ford has a reputation, on and off screen, for being grumpy. He’s mastered a look of simmering annoyance and would definitely be capable of chinning someone on set. I loved the idea that Seth’s smart mouth got him killed.

Temporarily at least.

Ford also had a trade before people knew who he was. He was a carpenter.

And he’s talked publicly about Star Wars and the role of Han Solo being the turning point where he didn’t have to go back to being one.

So I became fascinated by the idea. It’s a pivotal moment in his life.

What if he got fired? Sliding doors, eh?

I’ve said elsewhere, in another dimension, CBS release Tom Selleck from his Magnum contract and he becomes Indiana Jones instead.

If someone else becomes Han Solo, what butterfly effects emanate from that?

In the real world, it would be impossible to answer that question. We can’t rewind to 1977 and do an A/B test. One Star Wars with Ford and one without.

We can’t ever see the what-ifs and might-have-beens.

But what if Seth Stanley could?

What if I airdropped him into a situation where he could see the butterfly effects of films in other dimensions? And he could send society down a different path by changing something about a film?

That’s when I realised I could treat movies as cultural anchor points.

That’s quite the concept to play with.

So who’s behind all this and why?

What if there was an organisation that monitored the existential health of alternative timelines?

And if Seth was — originally at least — a stuntman involved in Movie Deaths, maybe it made sense for that organisation to be a movie studio.

A low-budget, slightly desperate, LA movie studio.

The kind of place where Seth Stanley might realistically turn up for a job interview.

Welcome to New Dimension Pictures.

And that’s when things started getting really weird…

Seth didn’t mean to be smart.

He never does.

But the curse of knowing another dimension. Another life.

Another future…

Is that you forget not everyone else has seen the end credits.

So when you meet a nervous, grumpy guy at a crossroads in his life, looking for his big break, that starring role; a way to provide for his family and get out of the woodshop…

sometimes you can end up getting a little mouthy and calling Harrison Ford a chippy. [shrug emoji].

He doesn’t like that.

One punch.

One pointlessly operational trash compactor.

Game over.

Seth didn’t find out until much later that Ford was fired from the set of Star Wars.

Never to become Indiana Jones.

Drinking for real from the cup of a carpenter.

While George Lucas gets Tom Selleck on the phone—

Harrison whittles away his days as proprietor — and chief chippy (sshhh) — of Ford Furniture Designs...

It’s not always easy to articulate where an idea comes from. Sometimes even when it is easy, it doesn’t make for a great anecdote.

Often the answer is embarrassingly simple.

Like, I threw some shit at a wall and painted the bits that stuck.

Or I made a joke and laughed out loud. I followed a hunch, and it interested me.

We can’t all be Paul McCartney, dreaming up the melody to Yesterday.

Lightning in a bottle rarely strikes once. Never mind twice.

So if ideas are so hard to come by, how am I making something exist, where before there was nothing?

Well, I’ll tell ya. I have tiny ideas. They fly into my mind, and I yank on their wings hard so they crash and burn. Then I sift through the wreckage.

I look hard for the bits that survived the impact. And see if I can build something useful out of them.

Like the A-Team.

Or Magyver.

Let me show you an example of how I do this by articulating years worth of self-conversation into one convenient back and forth…

Q: Why does Seth Stanley appear in all of the movie deaths?
A: Because it’s much funnier to think these are all happening to the same guy every time, than different people in each one. It’s like it’s inevitable. Like Death.

Q: OK. All of these movies are different genres, different time periods. Why is he there?
A: Maybe he’s a stuntman. And he’s ushered in at the last moment to perform the most dangerous death stunt. And it always goes to plan, which means he dies. Funny.

Q: The time period thing though? How can he be in Psycho and also Kill Bill?
A: He’s a time-travelling stuntman.

Q: Why is that a thing?
A: It’s his job. He’s not just there to perform a stunt. He’s fixing something.

Q: What is he fixing?
A: Maybe he’s been sent through time and or space to fix a mistake in a movie.

Q: Why would that be a thing?
A: Because maybe in other dimensions, films need fixing, or their cultural impact causes an extinction level event.

Q: Does that sound like a thing?
A: Sure, why not? Films have social and cultural impact, what if the end of a world could be traced back to something in a film?

Q: I ask the questions round here. Who does Seth Stanley work for?
A: Er…. an organisation that monitors the health of other dimensions. Maybe it’s disguised as a film studio.

Q: He doesn’t strike me as the stuntman type. Are you sure he’s a stuntman?
A: Yes, but by accident. He’s no hero.

Q: He dies all the time. Does he have to die? How can he die then appear in another movie death scene?
A: It’s a super power. But he’s not a superhero.

Q:Huh?
A: He gained it by accident. He’s an accidental stuntman who can’t die.

And this is but one line of questioning… there are so many strands to contend with. How proper writers do all this plotting and sequencing and such, I just don’t know.

I’m balancing who Seth is, what he does and why, with the addition of his family - Stella, Summer and Sally. Why are they important? How would they fit into a wider narrative story? What’s the purpose of a dimension-monitoring organisation dressed up as a film studio? Who else works there? Who does Seth work for? What’s the end game for the studio? What’s the narrative arc here?

I know the answers to some of those questions, but not all. And there are some emerging even now and I don’t know whether they’re a thing or not. I’ll just keep interviewing myself until I find out.

You see, there’s a lot to unpack just there - and I’ve been carrying this around for 15 years. You’ve only had a handful of posts…

Any questions?

When I started making illustrations for the A-Z of Movie Deaths back in 2011, I thought what I was doing looked kind of flat. I needed something to breathe some life into them and make them feel real.

Not realistic. Real.

Vibrant and tangible enough that they could actually exist.

I started experimenting with different textures in Photoshop and eventually tried adding felt to the shapes I'd created. It really elevated the drawings. Suddenly they were tactile. I could almost touch them through the screen.

They stopped feeling like shapes, and started feeling like things.

What didn’t occur to me then, was how much time adding textural detail would add to my creative process. I would sketch, outline and colour the drawings, and then have to find coloured textures that worked as part of the overall aesthetic. It was adding hours.

Often, when an artistic flourish becomes too much effort to maintain, I discard it. But I persevered with felt and texture, for a reason I couldn’t really articulate at the time.

Every illustration now had several new layers.

In every sense.

The felt stopped being a texture. It was sewn into the visual identity of what I was making. Even though I was working digitally, I could have been making these images by hand. It wasn’t a conscious thematic choice. I was just following what felt right.

Felt felt right.

And now it’s entwined with the story material I’ve been threading together around Seth Stanley.

I’d accidentally chosen a texture that came out of the box with its own storytelling language. A language of material, embroidery and needlework.

In Greek mythology, the three Sisters of Fate spin the thread of a person’s life, measure its length, and eventually cut it.

It’s a metaphor for the length of a life, and one we still use to talk about stories with multiple timelines and realities.

When people are having an emotional breakdown, we say they’re “coming apart at the seams”, or “fraying around the edges”. If we’re being really unkind, we might say they’re “unravelling”.

But fabric is not just a language of falling apart.

If we laugh uproariously, we might say we were “in stitches”.

If we get hurt, we need to be “patched up”.

Loose ends can be tied together. Torn things can be repaired.

If I was creating a man who could flit from movie death to movie death seamingly without consequence, had I stumbled on a way to demonstrate the cost?

Every death could leave a loose thread to follow up and take a little piece of Seth Stanley with it.

After all, without the peril of death, where is the tension?

This was another piece of the patchwork plot I was building towards.

STEP 1 - Find something you like to base your creative work on

STEP 2 - Make the creative work really good. So good that people love it and talk about it and buy all your stuff

STEP 3 - Sit back and watch the dollars roll in

STEP 4 - Light cigar with dollar and marvel at your own self-satisfaction

That’s how it goes right? Making money on the internet, it’s easy isn’t it? Everyone says so…

I thought it would be easy cos I was willing to do the work. And I was willing!

Or at least I thought I was.

Follow the process, I thought. Do STEP 1 and 2 to get to 3.

I’ll skip STEP 4 - I don’t smoke. Or set money on fire.

Intentionally.

I was thinking - what do I like? What do I spend money on? What persuades me to part with my hard earned cash? If I’m likely to spend money on a thing, won’t others want to do that too?

I looked around at my art prints. My books. My interests. What bound them together?

It was mainly movies. Graphic design. Weird stuff. Alternative culture.

My favourite things that I owned were a ton of Scott Campbell prints and his Great Showdown books. I loved them, they were awesome.

Scott C had found a hook.

His work sits at a perfect intersection between warm nostalgia, collectability and pop culture remixing.

The Great Showdowns feel like they’re painted by someone with genuine love for the films they represent. They never feel like exploitation of someone else’s intellectual property - rather a super talented fan’s sincere attempt to filter a fondly remembered movie through their lens.

Why couldn’t I have found that hook?

Maybe given time I (or someone else) would have, but then I’d have been gut-punched by finding out Scott C had beaten me to it. That duplex apartment was already occupied.

But perhaps there was a studio to let next door?

I was definitely looking in the same cultural neighbourhood…

I wanted to produce a set of collectible, fun illustrations on a theme, preferably to do with movies.

Scott C’s illustrations were about showdowns - either physical or emotional - but beautifully restrained in their execution. Often reduced to characters standing opposite each other, or an object from a key scene in the movie.

But the visual language was always perfect to orient the viewer. They knew instantly what they were looking at because these moments are burned into people’s minds.

What other cinematic goldmine could I plunder? Hmm…what about…. deaths?

What if I drew a key death from a movie? What if I did it in a funny way?

I did some internet research to see if this was a thing, and I didn’t see anything framed in the way I was thinking, so I figured I was good to go.

A friend of mine dropped me a message around that time — “Saw this and thought of you. It’s kinda weird.”

It was a link to Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies. A darkly comic alphabet book of rhyming couplets showing the illustrated demise of 26 children.

What I took from Gorey wasn’t the dead children.

Probably best to be clear on that.

What fascinated me was the structure. An alphabet. A repeated format. A gloomy joke on every page. A tone that somehow made something grim feel playful instead of cruel.

It looked like a children’s book, but it wasn’t for children at all. There was mischief inside it. A dark wit hiding in plain sight.

The illustrations were deceptively simple too. Black and white pen-and-ink drawings, often with very little going on in them. No dramatic horror. No spectacle. Just children meeting strangely ordinary ends in oddly mundane situations.

Life and death, as they usually are.

And underneath each image sat half of a rhyming couplet, cheerful in rhythm and completely at odds with the subject matter. The whole thing felt wrong in a way that made it impossible not to enjoy.

I loved it.

More importantly, I started wondering why I loved it.

My brain immediately switched from admiration to analysis. What exactly was I responding to here? And was there anything in the DNA of this project that I could twist into something that felt more like mine?

I wasn’t interested in copying Gorey. I wanted to understand the mechanics.

I realised pretty quickly that I was never going to be a realistic artist. I was never going to out-da Vinci da Vinci. Or even out-draw the guy doing caricatures on a seaside boardwalk.

I preferred roughness. Simpler shapes. More abstract characters. A style where a lack of finesse could hopefully pass itself off as personality.

Think more Simpsons than da Vinci.

And somewhere in all of that doodling, this little orange guy appeared.

I didn’t have a visual language like Scott C, where he could paint different characters in his style, and you still knew who they were at a glance.

I had an idea and a copy of Photoshop. But I hadn’t done the work to help a style emerge.

It occurred to me, what if instead of drawing bespoke characters for each movie death - I just inserted the same character into all of them? It would be like a running joke that this guy dies all the time!

Remember Mr Benn? The 1980s British kids tv show? He would visit a fancy dress shop in each episode, and put on a costume, like a knight or a policeman or a construction worker. Then he’d go through a magic door in the changing room and have an adventure appropriate to the costume. It was awesome.

I just wanted a Mr Benn costume.

Seth Stanley was my Mr Benn in these drawings! First he’s Apollo Creed, then he’s Drexl from True Romance, then he’s Jack from Titanic. Dying in a variety of comedic inevitabilities.

Looking back, I think I was just drawing my version of dressy-up.

While I doodled, I thought about who Seth Stanley was, and why he was in these drawings of movies that spanned genres and generations. I imagined him to be a time-travelling stuntman, always getting landed with playing out a death scene with hilarious consequences!

But somehow, he was back again in the next image, and the next, and the next. So he was able to regenerate. Death was not the end for him. Why?

I started to think about who he was between the images. What is he doing when we can’t see him? I liked to think of him propping up his local bar, in much the same way Homer Simpson props up Moe’s. But not so regularly. He had a home to go to.

And who was he going home to, exactly?

Well, he had a wife, Stella, and two daughters, Summer and Sally, who ran rings around him. I didn’t know a great deal about them, yet. But they were there.

And just like that, an abstract shape that became a running joke became a man with a family, a home and a job. Each death scene was a high-stakes assignment. Not just a funny picture in a sequence I’d hoped people might want to collect.

The gang was all here. A functioning family, arriving fully formed in my mind. As for the rest of the details, I had time on my side to work those out…

Thanks for reading.

People I mentioned in this article you may want to know more about:

Scott C’s work

Mr Benn

Close your eyes.

Imagine your favourite character from your favourite film.

Got it? Good.

Now, replace them in your mind, with a contemporary of theirs. How does the film look? How does it play out? Better? Worse?

It’s worse, isn’t it? Much worse?

The jokes don’t land. The drama doesn’t hit. It just feels off.

I remember the first time I heard the story that Eric Stoltz was the original Marty McFly in Back To The Future. And that the vibe was off because he brought a method acting intensity to the role. He bruised Thomas F. Wilson’s collarbones, such was the realism he injected into their push and shove scenes.

Really? Keith, the artist from Some Kind Of Wonderful bullied Biff Tannen? No wonder he made like a tree and got out of there.

So Michael J. Fox was hired and the rest is history. Or is it…the future?

No, it’s history. Time-travel doesn’t exist.

And there are lots of these stories…

Sylvester Stallone was lined up to play Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop. Michael Madsen was all set to be Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. Tom Selleck passed an audition and would have been Indiana Jones, if it wasn’t for CBS holding him to his Magnum contract.

God bless you, CBS.

It’s unfathomable to think of anyone playing Indiana Jones other than the inimitable Harrison Ford. But what if we back up a step or two?

Ford was offered Indiana Jones off the back of playing Han Solo in Star Wars.

And, according to internet lore, Selleck was under consideration for Solo too.

Can you imagine Han Solo with the easy-going charm of Magnum P.I instead of Ford’s cynical mercenary swagger?

Suddenly he’s a little less dangerous. Less scrappy. Much less cool.

Once Solo changes, everything downstream starts changing too. The magic begins to evaporate…

Selleck wasn’t the sole Solo alternative either.

There was Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Sylvester Stallone, Nick Nolte, Kurt Russell, Robert Englund.

Robert Englund as Han Solo? In your dreams!

Our brains treat movie history like embedded cultural fact. Which it is. It’s immutable.

But what if it wasn’t?

The movies we grew up with and quote daily were only ever a bad casting decision away from becoming something else entirely.

Take Ford out of Star Wars, and watch the cultural butterfly effect shift all the way from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, the Jack Ryan movies and the Fugitive to the Academy Award-dodging Cowboys and Aliens and Expendables 3.

Maybe without Star Wars, Ford goes back to drinking from the cup of a carpenter as part of his day job, not just to save his dad from a gunshot wound.

One role. One audition. One decision.

A hair’s width away from entire cornerstones of popular culture shifting half a degree off.

In a universe of infinite possibilities, surely all of these casting decisions and more would have happened somewhere!

What if they did happen? What if they caused cultural cataclysms?

And what if this was the explanation for the A-Z of Movie Deaths and why Seth Stanley keeps appearing in them?

What if the A-Z is Seth’s attempt to save the multiverse?

It’s been a minute since I was last on Substack as a writer. Or maybe a year…

In 2011, I drew this guy - Seth Stanley - and I’ve been bugged by how he fits into my life ever since.

I thought it could be as the main character in my Edward Gorey-inspired A-Z of Movie Deaths. I tried to sell it as an e-book. I think maybe two people bought it. That sounds depressing, but I was just proud to make the thing and let people see it. Now, I’ve made it available for free.

Download the A-Z of Movie Deaths

It didn’t scratch the itch though. I was carrying Seth Stanley around with me. Not in a Tyler Durden kind of way, but maybe I was heading there…

A (graphic) novel idea

I gave him a family, a job, a friend, and a graphic novel storyline full of existential threat for him to navigate. I often revisit it in my mind. I haven’t got it right yet. Hell - I can’t even draw his face consistently. At 48, with a family, learning to draw, write and plot out a graphic novel feels wildly over-ambitious.

Just dealing with my own family is biting off more than I can chew.

Where do we get those wonderful toys?

Periodically, I play with the idea that Seth Stanley would thrive in the Japanese toy market, and I don’t think he would look out of place on a shelf in Pop Mart.

Last night, in my head, I designed the packaging for a whole line of Movie Death toys. It was a fleeting glimpse of a future I’d like to see, but can’t touch yet.

I don’t want my posts just to be about Movie Death ideas anymore. I want to write about how I find out where Seth Stanley belongs. And maybe then he’ll stop following me around. For a while.

Johnson

Hey folks,

Download my A-Z of Movie Deaths PDF e-book for free.

I hope it brings you joy and you briefly forget what insignificant little flies we are buzzing around a big spinning space ball, worrying about dying.

If you download it, I’d love to hear what you think of it. Let me know in the comments, would ya?

A-Z of Movie Deaths

37.8MB ∙ EPUB file

Download

Download

Creativity is marvellous. The act of combining skills we’ve acquired with ideas that we have to make a thing that wasn’t there before.

We make it, we admire it, then we let it loose into the wild. Some of us don’t care whether or not another human ever sees it or uses it. Some of us care about that very deeply.

We care so much that we tell ourselves that making the thing is pointless. We can see a million things better than the thing we made, without even trying too hard. We can see a million things we wished we made more than the thing we did make.

Sucks to be us, right?

The one thing we can’t ever get away from, no matter how hard we try, or how much we improve, is that the thing in question, was made by us. Every essay, every painting, every song has a uniqueness about it that we just can’t shake off. A ‘you-ness’ or a ‘me-ness’.

It’s a thing a lot of us wrestle with.

It’s the thing that stops us from inherently thinking our work is good. It’s the nagging voice that encourages imposter syndrome. It’s the thought that enters our head asking “Why even bother doing this?” “I’m wasting my time.”

I hear it a lot.

I’ve heard it a ton over the last 14 years.

In 2011, shortly before my eldest daughter was born, I decided to block out the voices and do it...

I started a thing

I’ve already written plenty about the idea I had to create an illustrated A-Z of Movie Deaths and where it came from.

With a head full of dreams, and a pirate copy of Photoshop, I headed for the big city, determined that this was going to be my ticket to the big time, and a lifetime of fame and fortune.

That’s right - this would put me on the road to… becoming an illustrator!

Hmmm. Spoiler alert: it didn’t quite pan out like that.

No change of career, no fame and fortune. Not yet anyway.

But I had a baby! And then not long after, I had another one. Then life kept happening.

— Time jump — like in The Walking Dead or something.

More life kept happening. I got tired. I had to do chores. My mum died.

— Another time jump — Rick Grimes got older. So did I.

Fast forward to last year and I was no closer to being famous or rich. And no closer to finishing the passion project I was so excited to start. I’d picked it up over the years, but I’d put it down more.

The voices had got the better of me, and the urge to finish the A-Z wasn’t there. I couldn’t see the point. I thought I was onto something with it, I really did.

I thought it was a killer idea, and I’d executed it pretty well. But was it going to make me a millionaire? Apparently not. And certainly not in its unfinished state.

Somewhere round about when I started on Substack last year, I got to thinking how most people weren’t millionaires or famous, but still managed to get real satisfaction out of making things.

They could ignore the voices telling them not to bother. They could stop procrastinating and find joy in making things. So I cracked on and now…

I finished the thing!

And I honestly can’t tell you how happy I feel that it’s completed. I hope it’s the start of a much more regular creative practice.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here - it’s a 28 page illustrated ebook. It’s darkly comic. It’s colourful and it’s fun.

It’s not War and Peace, or a Pyramid.

Or The White Album.

But it’s mine. And it’s finished. It’s a thing I can say with pride that I made. And I like it, whether you like it or not. Whether you even read it or not.

Go get the thing!

If you’d like to support me, you can buy the A-Z of Movie Deaths ebook and pay what you like.

If you don’t want to take a look at it for less than the price of a coffee, or a chocolate bar, there are other ways you could help me out that don’t cost anything.

You could:

• like and/or restack this post

• tell other people about me and this project

• leave a comment and we can chat

• let me know if you’d like to work on something with me

• do something else I haven’t thought of

Now, go and make your thing!

See you next time.

Hello folks.

I’ve been going through some old folders, and I found this - a Seth Stanley strip comic I made during lockdown. So, 2020 I guess.

I’d completely forgotten I ever made it.

I was cracking up a bit at the time. Couldn’t see family and friends, my mum had died the previous year, and having two young kids in the house was tough.

We couldn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t do anything. We were accumulating a ton of money that we couldn’t spend. How the world took it back!

So, I turned to something that took the edge off a little. Taking Seth Stanley out of his movie death environment and seeing if I could make a panel comic to convey what I was feeling at the time. It brought back a blend of different flavoured memories stumbling across this.

Hope you enjoy it. Tell me if it resonates.

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I am not alone in my fear of death. It’s something many of us share. It’s not a phobia.

It’s not like, I don’t know, say Omphalophobia: a fear of belly buttons.

Or Pupaphobia: a fear of puppets, dummies or marionettes.

Or Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: would you believe, a fear of long words?

It seems the folks in charge of naming phobias did so with a sense of irony.

Generic, unspecified fear of death is a common thing. We fear what we don’t understand, right? And we have lots of questions around death.

What will it feel like? Will it hurt? When will it happen?

Too many unknowns.

And I don’t know about you, but my head tries to answer them in the quiet spaces. Drifting off to sleep at night, I get that sudden wakening that one day, maybe soon, death is coming. I can’t outrun it, or bargain with it. It will just be there, creeping all over me, with no time to pack a bag and say goodbye before Charon the Boatman ferries me across the River Styx.

Thoughts of death often accompany me to the movies. In the dark, with nothing to focus on but a huge screen and popcorn-flavoured solitude, it doesn’t take a violent, action-packed drama to make me consider my own mortality.

Ryan Reynolds’ “IF”, was the last movie to get me thinking about deathly things.

I’ve also been known to let my mind drift during such contemplative, soul-searching masterpieces as “Meet The Croods” and “Despicable Me 2”.

I don’t know why it hits me at the movies, it just does.

But as someone scared of the idea of dying with a healthy appreciation for movies, it’s no surprise that this publication is taking shape the way it is.

My reaction to preoccupation with death is to try and laugh in its face. To hold it up for examination and find humour in it.

Because if I can’t do that, I’ll fall apart.

It’s a big deal. It’s the end of the line. The big goodbye. I don’t think our tiny human brains are built to cope with that kind of finality. Just as we’re not equipped to think of the universe as infinite. I can feel my mind boggling, thinking about it as I type.

To laugh at death - both how it happens and who it happens to - somehow makes me forget the searing pain of the empty space where a person used to be. And one day, the space where I used to be.

I’ve had the poor fortune/privilege of witnessing my parents’ deaths first-hand. To be there at someone’s end is an honour dripping with sadness. The crushing devastation of knowing they’ve exited stage left and their part in this whole delicious show is over.

Homer said (and I may be paraphrasing - Google isn’t aiding my recall) “All human life is here”, but it’s not. It has been here, but it’s not here now.

My love for Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies”, an oft-quoted reference in these here parts, is rooted in finding humour in death. The absurdity of some of the images makes me wonder if Gorey had some of the same thoughts I do. If you take the book at face value, it’s kind of hideous. But no one was hurt in the drawing of these pictures.

While I’m laughing at death, it can’t get me.

Drawing Seth Stanley and the A-Z of Movie Deaths is born out of that. When I draw these little scenes of devastation, I smile to myself and forget just how horrible and final death really is.

Seth is tired. It’s literally his job to die. Over and over and over again. In a variety of bizarre ways, like they do in the movies. That’s funny, right?

While this may seem like a throwaway project to you, it’s literally my legacy. Something I hope my family will treasure after I’ve gone. My kids love it. They’re always curious about what’s coming next.

It’s what I’ll leave behind to show that for a time, however brief, I was only preoccupied with laughing at death, not death itself. Manipulating my own personal voodoo doll to die 26 horrible ways.

Til next time!

Johnson

Hey folks,

I hope you all had a great festive break and a positive New Year, full of promise.

Before Christmas, I made the decision to move away from Think. Write.Ship for my publication branding and concentrate on finishing my Movie Deaths project. I have high hopes for Seth Stanley, and I want to pursue those instead of telling all of you writers out there how to suck eggs and continuing to peddle writing advice that you can probably find elsewhere and isn’t massively helpful anyway.

I do hope that’s not going to change anything between us - I’m still the same person, I’ve just shifted focus slightly. But if you decide this isn’t what you signed up for, that’s ok. We can be grown-ups about this. I’ll still say hi when I see you around.

For anyone planning to stick around, I’m excited to say I can see the finish line of the A-Z of Movie Deaths up ahead. Or certainly the illustrated part anyway.

I’ve left this section alone for the longest time, but I had some really good suggestions of characters to try out with Seth Stanley, and just like that, I have some fresh momentum again.

I’ve been sketching like mad, and knocking a few new ideas out this week. They’re unfinished, rough drafts, but I’d love to know what you think.

You might recognise S and T from my Movie Death advent calendar Notes in December.

All the rest are new. I can’t draw them sequentially, I have to go where the mood takes me, so Z is there, but for now, X and Y are not. Hopefully more on those next time.

S is for Stay Puft

T is for T-1000

U is for Ursula

V is for Vincent

W is for William

Let’s gloss over X and Y for now. I bet you can guess them though?

Z is for Zod

Please, please, please let me know how you think these are shaping up - and on a wider note, let me know if you’re enjoying the whole Movie Deaths thing. I’d love to know what more you’d like to see from the publication in 2025.

Once the A-Z is done, I’ll be focusing on dropping Seth Stanley into a more structured story - but still undecided what the format will be. One thing’s for sure, I know I can’t be the only person who wants to see what Seth Stanley gets up to next!

Til next time.

Johnson

When anyone asks me, “What’s your favourite film cameo of all time?”, (and you’d be surprised how often I get asked…) I turn to True Romance.

It’s a film filled with a number of high-profile turns that could all answer that question.

From the Dennis Hopper/Christopher Walken confrontation, to Brad Pitt’s couch-hugging junkie slacker Floyd. It is truly a cavalcade of superbly written and beautifully acted cameos, one after the other, that elevate True Romance to one of the best action films of the 1990's.

In my opinion, second only to Lee Donowitz’s incredible Coming Home In A Bodybag.

But the turn that really stands out in this movie, for me, is Gary Oldman as Alabama’s terrifying pimp, Drexl Spivey.

I don’t need to talk at length about Gary Oldman’s acting prowess, or how he seamlessly inhabits one character to the next. He’s built up quite the resume over the last 40 years.

With dreadlocks, wonky eye and cheetah print dressing gown, Drexl leaves a lasting impression. On screen for only 7 minutes, the dangerous white pimp who thinks he’s black, dies in the most amusing way.

Christian Slater’s Clarence, the hero of the piece, fights with Drexl, and after gaining the upper hand, shoots him in the groin and in the head, taking down some expensive-looking fish tanks in the process.

The artwork

Drexl suffers the indignity of being shot in his undies. His dressing gown flailing open, he sends the occupants of his fancy aquarium to fishy heaven in a shower of glass as he crashes through the tanks.

I had some fun with this - altering Seth Stanley’s usually black pupil to a cool blue-grey to replicate Drexl’s odd pigment condition.

It was also fun really treating this like collage, with fake animal print for the dressing gown, a repeating pattern for the wallpaper and some brown felt for Drexl’s dreads. I used a spatter brush to make the blood stains on the wall behind (and the patch on his undies).

Drexl was my D cos I really wanted to draw him, and I was pleased with how this one turned out.

Who would be your D? Any ideas who could have replaced Drexl? Or maybe someone I could line up for a Volume 2?

(I’m still unfinished from S onwards - ideas are always welcome!)

Thanks for reading!

Hey! I wrote a mini book!

It’s called Stealing From Songwriters!

If you like my writing, take a look - it’s full of tips to power-up your writing from 10 of music’s best storytellers. I bet there’s something in there that will help you on your writing journey - for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

It’s available to buy on Gumroad.

If that’s not for you, there are other ways you can support me.

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I feel bad for kids these days, for so many reasons. But one stands above all others — you want to know why?

Cos they have a really shitty impression of Robert de Niro.

They don’t remember him. How he was. They don’t care how he could drive a story forward with nothing more than a narrowing of his eyebrows.

Or how he looked like he could bury you just by turning down the corners of his mouth.

He’s 81 now, and he looks like a wax model of the real Robert de Niro that started to melt.

They see him on Uber Eats ads. Berating Donald Trump on social media. Or looking like a grumpy grandfather, shifting uncomfortably in his seat at the Oscars. The reality is, he’s probably getting next to no sleep as he’s just become a father again!

This is not how I want to remember de Niro.

I want to remember him in Godfather. In Taxi Driver. In This Boy’s Life. Or even in his excellent performance in The Joker.

Most of all, I want to remember him at his most badass — as pumped-up violent serial rapist, Max Cady, in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear.

As usual, this character is so injected with his method acting lunacy, you just don’t see de Niro here at all. He’s gone.

He disappeared into a regime of chin-ups and crunches, eating brown rice and green vegetables. He even spent $5000 getting his teeth sharpened for the role (and then $20,000 getting them put back to normal after the movie)— all to fuel the illusion that he really was someone who’d been exercising throughout his entire jail term in preparation for his release.

The movie

When Cady gets released from prison, he seeks out revenge on the lawyer who defended him on a rape and battery charge of a 16 year old girl. The lawyer, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) holds evidence back that would have seen Cady acquitted. As you can imagine, he’s a little upset about that.

The death scene

Sam Bowden spends most of the film trying to keep Cady away from his family, knowing that revenge is most certainly on his mind. The finale of the film finds both men on a houseboat in the midst of a storm.

Cady ends the film handcuffed to the boat, as it sinks. He goes down with it, singing the hymn “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand”, the whole time, creepily maintaining eye contact with Bowden, who has pulled himself to safety.

The artwork

I wanted to capture Cady’s final moments, as he’s going down with the houseboat. I added the cigar, which he obviously doesn’t have in this scene in the film, but it’s a prop that Cady’s seen with at other times. Particularly in the cinema scene, where he’s blowing smoke up towards the ceiling and laughing heartily.

I spent a while on the tattoos, trying to get them right, as I felt like this was a key part of the image. I like the effect of the water, which I tried to make look slightly transparent.

My little orange guy is looking nervously towards the water level, which is creeping ever closer. It’s intended as a comic effect to undermine the seriousness of the moment.

Thanks for reading!

Hey! I wrote a mini book!

It’s called Stealing From Songwriters!

If you like my writing, take a look - it’s full of tips to power-up your writing from 10 of music’s best storytellers. I bet there’s something in there that will help you on your writing journey - for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

It’s available to buy on Gumroad.

If that’s not for you, there are other ways you can support me.

Are you enjoying the newsletter?

If you enjoyed reading this, there’s a few things you could do to help me:

• Support my writing and buy me a coffee!

• Like it, leave a comment and re-stack it to share it with your audience

• Recommend Think. Write. Ship to your subscribers using Substack’s Recommend feature

• Subscribe to Think. Write. Ship to continue enjoying my posts

• If you already subscribe, would you consider upgrading to a paid subscription? It costs less than the price of a coffee per month. It helps me prove to my family that I can have a real go at this writing malarkey and buys me more time to keep words of quality coming your way

• If you have upgraded to paid, then cheers! Thank you for your support - your next task should you choose to accept it, is to talk me up to your friends, and get them to pay for a subscription too