#february 2011 nyu steinhardt players club bat boy production starring will roland

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sketches i saved but didn’t finish (or the finished version was a new attempt) all from 2020 i think

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happy day 3, happy the-2-available-pictures

will roland-bat boy

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The Suspects

this was all supposed to take a humorous couple of hours but seeing as that didn’t happen, at some point in the process i made this Quasi Aesthetic / Character Blog about this very notion of “shoving all the characters together to see what you can learn”

god knows in the hours after posting this i’ll think up two dozen better, really obvious things i could’ve pointed out, but it’s good to just be taking this essential analytical approach in the first place, no matter one’s incompetence

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i was like “hmm let me take a break from this one drawing and do another drawing” and i had already been listening to “inside your heart” approximately 39 times because it’s just like that

it’s great and has edgar being all deservedly dramatic and then juxtaposing that w/ shelley being all “ok but quit it”

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happy day three of this anniversary, happy the-first-3.0-show-is-happening-while-i-type, it’s not a coincidence!!!

shoutout to @a-quick-squip and i for deciding edgar needs sunglasses & earmuffs to ease his cave-attuned senses into daytime surface life. i’ve also decided when first experiencing a shirt he may react like a cat being put in a sweater and freeze up for a while. thank you

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february 2011 nyu steinhardt players club production of bat boy starring will roland fandom

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i had these fun decent sketches & then when i was moving a selection sai flipped out and closed in 0.2 seconds, & when i tried recreating some of them i resigned myself to two & then to this one and spent too long on it

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he absolutely slept upside down like a proper roosting bat every day for 16-19 years or however long!!! a halo is just something i throw in sometimes and it helps the composition here. patron saint of being undone by your hunger for both corn chips and blood.

speaking of…..ruthie was a real Cryptid Ally for like, being way down in an unexplored part of a cave and then seeing something resembling a human crawling around and trying to offer them food instead of doing absolutely anything else. not the best idea though!!! the cryptid might have a heinous local stepdad!! and might bite you because he’s been raised by a bat colony. when you’re in caves, only bat rules apply

vampire bats don’t live in west virginia but neither do human-bat hybrids. what with the irrepressible hunger for blood and the anticoagulants in his spit ed’s gotta be Half Vamp, Baby. vampire bats funky lil faces are just too good

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i’ve posted this before but not when using a consistent tag for this & god knows you can’t search your own blog decently & i’ll repost it on the slightest provocation anyways, and monday night is real february 2011 nyu steinhardt players club bat boy production starring will roland hours. #1 banger from the #1 production. ughh the Drama

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i’ll post the full video of this Comfort And Joy a hundred times because the whole thing is entirely fantastic but also here’s Just will roland’s solo bit / the climax of the song

and here’s the full comfort and joy

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OH my god speaking of youtube, i was just Back On This Vid cuz im watching all sorts of shit while drawing these memes & i scroll down to appreciate the one comment where someone rhapsodizes about how excellent this production is, They Get It—

and so anyways i also see this one & expand the replies cuz, i dunno, and it’s the dude who posted the video / plays dr parker replying THREE MERE DAYS AGO…….like this video is literally a month away from being 8 yrs old but he’s still on it!! it seems pointless to ask but i wanna barge in like PLEASE are there other clips!!! i’m dying, william spinnato!!!!! but i’m not sure i remember my youtube account login like, at all

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hey I just wanted to thank you for making me listen to Bat Boy with your incredible art (which I literally love more than words can describe. I've never seen someone capture the essence of something like this, I'm absolutely enamoured, with all your art, but rn specifically the bat boy art, I just wanna see your Will Roland-based character design for Edgar animated or something) I'm now super into it and can't get enough of it!!!

oh shit i’m glad to hear it lmao out here like “hey, will roland really likes this weird niche musical he did once so i looked into it and then got into it” and advertising it w/ drawings b/c like, his Look in this one sacred video we have of comfort & joy (which fucks) is amazingly fun. fangs / ears / hair = i wanna draw that

here he is Aglow

like it’s kinda wild how to talk about What This Show Is Like b/c it’s really like, Such a mashup in like, themes and genre and musical styles.....this weird classic-classic-sci-fi nigh-magical-realism greek-tragedy-esque rock musical, where you listen to some songs and go “this is strange but in a fun way and these slap” and then inevitably we all go what! what!! w  h a t ! ! ! but then you go okay well then, and before you know it you’re beyond the weirdness trappings and accidentally invested in the earnestness you can find all in the midst of it

it’s cool my drawings are advertising lmao i really like, love the Design there natch, and truly the idea of this kid really just being a bat for 1/3 of the play is also really like, okay, how would a bat child they found in a cave like, move around?? that part sounds fun, being in strange positions and physically navigating environments and situations in an unusual manner. i’d like to crawl around lmao my forte......and so yeah it’s fun to draw him in that way too. actually just the other day i had that Drawing Concept, him in a weird Crouch Slouch. and animation would go exactly with all this “What’s A Human-Shaped Bat’s Movement” imagining.....god i wish that were me* (*being good enough at basic concepts of animation to do this half effectively)

anyways yeah i’m real glad we’re out here having fun and being ourselves....you go to look into what the hell will roland keeps talking about and then at some point later you realize now you’re just genuinely into it too, thanks a lot will

but it IS good lmao so why not. Oh To Have More Videos Of Will Performing This Role

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and just also to say that the bmc bway previews open on the anniversary of the closing performance of the february 2011 nyu steinhardt players club bat boy production starring will roland, which obviously means Something

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i took this screenshot like a couple weeks ago because i then spent the day distracted by will’s tv roles eventually getting to Winston so i didn’t get around to posting this and also im sure i’ve posted practically this exact moment before but it’s SO good like ugh this production’s comfort and joy truly is the best and the staging right here is so good like wow imagining seeing that head-on but amazing from every angle, even will as edgar looking blown out by the lighting on the camera is good as the Innocent Soul whom is also struggling to find god so he can plead to be proven human, everyone as the Voices In My Head for dr parker amassed behind him as this destructive murderous aggression directed at edgar but barely held back by dr parker’s veneer of civility and desire to carry this out in a way that preserves this veneer.....................i’m overwhelmed

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oh i actually went back the other week and produced a (i think) comprehensive “unproducible smackdown” tag….another one of those niche ones….But Fun

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Okay but you gotta think about how blind af Edgar had to be suddenly getting dragged out of his dark cave, as a boy who hunts at night with his bat family. I can’t imagine suddenly being brought into the light was the best for his eyes.

Oh Totally!!! like being part bat probably does make his eyes more sensitive than not-part-bat people’s, and he says he sees well in dim light, and also that he never even left the cave his whole life? which, i dunno what he’s eating down there since he can only eat blood, but also vampire bats feed each other, so maybe that’s happening a lot since he definitely wouldn’t’ve been able to hunt worth shit as say, a newborn infant. i think it was evening or night when he got hauled out of the cave? which had to help a bit? and plus his head was covered up until he was brought into the parkers’ basement, so maybe except for the Headlamps he really did have a gentler transition than like, dragging him right into the sun for the first time in 15/16 yrs, cuz that would be a bit intense considering he possibly lived all but like an hour of his existence in total darkness…..you’d definitely need a long period of easing into Experiencing Light after that. imagine him wearing sunglasses like constantly for the entire first act b/c his eyes aren’t even used to indoor levels of brightness yet. 

plus maybe he’s more sensitive to noise really, but that never specifically comes up. possibly it’s implied he echolocates……but again like, even if he didn’t have the Bat Properties, he’s only lived with cave levels of noises, which i guess is like. the other bats, and water droplets, and himself. like everything he could see or hear would be brand fuckin new, plus would be at 102938417x the levels of stimulation he’s used to. so imagine him wearing sunglasses and earmuffs to help ease into things……….very vogue