DeadMaul / Darth Pool

Darth Maul and Deadpool in a double headlock.

Or, what is black and red all over?
(Comic books featuring Deadpool or Darth Maul)

Or, what goes black, red, black, red, black red?
(Deadpool and Darth Maul wrestling)

Pathetic, I know. My kids did not even find those amusing.

The morally questionable guys in red and black continue to be compelling at our house. Our younger son has not had the pleasure of viewing the "Phantom Menace" movie to see Darth Maul's first appearance.  But he was still pretty happy to see Maul reappear in the recent "Star Wars Rebels" season 2 finale, trying to entice the adolescent protagonist, Ezra, over to the dark side.

And Maul has that double lightsaber, so how could he not be cool?
And Deadpool is just Deadpool...and somehow the epitome of cool lately.

For some reason, my cell phone camera can't deal with the color red, so all of the subtlety and tonal range in the drawing seems to drop out of the digital image... (That's right, I just used the words "subtlety and tonal range" in regard to a drawing on a napkin.) This technology has improved a lot over the last few years. Previous red napkins looked much worse. But it still has a ways to go.
You will just have to trust me that the napkin looks better in person.

On another uninteresting technical note: I had a lot of trouble sorting this image out- figuring out which arm belonged to whom, and what part should be in shadow or in light.  So I am posting a flipped version of the image below so it might make more sense.

And of course it is a napkin, so perhaps there is no permanent right side up.

Darth Menorah

It's hard to stay on the Dark Side when your head is on fire.

Last night was only the first night of Hanukkah, but any drawing of a menorah seems to require a full complement of candles.  While I was considering sticking 8 candles on the top of Vader's shiny helmet, the kids convinced me that Darth Maul was the better choice. Fortuitously, Maul has exactly 8 horns visible from the front view.

I guess he must be holding the shamus in his hand since it doesn't fit on his head.

Cyrus From "Star Wars: Jedi Academy"

After a previous three years-long obsession, our sons now claim to be completely over the Star Wars franchise... (unless we are talking about video games of course.)

Jeffrey Brown's "Star Wars: Jedi Academy" somehow managed to get around their usual prejudice against things Star Wars.  The story of a Luke Skywalker-like underachiever who attends a Jedi Academy that is very similar to an American middle school is inventively told in a mixture of comics, journals and clippings.  The story and format appealed to both our six and ten year old sons.

Of course, what Ansel liked best, and wanted on his napkin, was the ominously hooded bully in the book, a junior Darth Maul named Cyrus.