Jay Maynard's Linucon costume: General Xinchub

The character

This character is from Howard Tayler's excellent web comic strip, Schlock Mercenary. General Levaughn Matsui Xinchub is the head of military intelligence of the United Nations of Sol. He is a major figure in the UNS military, since Intelligence has been split out into its own branch. He, like his 21st century intelligence counterparts, is responsible for not only interpreting and explaining intelligence, but also running covert operations to gain it. He is absolutely ruthless in this pursuit. Everyone and everything is expendable, and nobody and nothing will get in his way. This does not endear him to his colleagues, but he doesn't care, since he's got a mission to accomplish.

Here's a picture Howard drew so you can get a better view of the General:

I selected General Xinchub because, out of all of the characters in Schlock Mercenary, he is the only one whose body type resembles mine. Everyone else is in at least good physical shape, as one would expect from fighting men and women.

The costume design

The costume is designed to match General Xinchub's uniform as closely as possible with 21st century materials. Howard's description of the uniforms worn by Tagon's Toughs and the UNS military:

Low-profile body armor is a skin-tight suit woven from 'powered fullerenes.' This means that the fullerene tubules (carbonan is a brand I've referenced in the strip, but I believe there are other elements than carbon that can make good fullerene tubules) have a power source that strengthens their molecular bonds artificially, and that offers a rigidifying field under impact. The best suits also have limited gravitics, which allow for flight and for compensation when you're hit by a projectile that throws you against a wall.

So what does it look like?
1) skin tight.
2) Shirt can be taken off separately from pants (mostly for plot purposes -- I've needed to show characters 'dressing' without showing them stark naked)
3) The belt, collar, cuffs, and ankle-cuffs are stiff, and conceal gloves, helmet, weaponry, and the marble-sized annie-plants that power the fullerenes.
4) Boots are big.
5) helmets are low-profile... little more than a padded cap (only loaded with future-tech that protects your head better than a full motorcycle helmet with a kevlar shell would today)
6) epaulets hover. If I wanted to build these, I'd use 3cm of wire painted to match the uniform shirt, and mount a styrofoam epaulet on top of this bristle, which would in turn be mounted on a thin metal plate about the size of a silver dollar, and formed to match my shoulder.

This presents some challenges, but not major ones. I thought, after the TRON costume, that this would be a piece of cake. I was only partially right.

The pieces

The leotard

First, the top. The uniform shirts do not have visible closures, although characters are shown fastening collars and such occasionally. This means that a pullover is needed to avoid having to use a zipper. After my experiences with the TRON costume, I also decided that a dance belt would be obligatory. Finally, I didn't want a skintight top to creep up on my torso and add wrinkles that wouldn't look right.

The solution: A thong leotard with a snap crotch. This goes on like a shirt, won't creep, and, like a dance belt, will provide support without showing lines under tights. I went back to Renaissance Dancewear and ordered one custom-made, with gold metallic spandex collar 1-1/2 inches tall and cuffs 1/2 inch long, and dyed to match the olive drab used in the strip.




The darkening you see in the lower part is the tights I have on underneath showing through; the leotard itself is one uniform color.

The tights

The pants in the strip are shown in a dark grey to allow Howard to show motion and details, which don't show up well in printed black. We decided, though, that the actual uniforms are black, since that looks better in a military context. I decided to have the belt and cuffs sewn into the tights so they wouldn't shift position and the tights legs wouldn't ride up over separate socks. The belt is 2 inches wide, and the cuffs one inch; both are the same gold metallic spandex as used on the leotard.

The stars

As noted above, officers' rank insignia hover over the wearer's shoulder. General Xinchub's three stars would be easy, I thought. It turned out to be harder than I thought to find metal stars with some thickness to them, but my roommate found some at a local scrapbooking shop. I ground off the spikes on the rear that were intended to hold them to a piece of paper, then painted them gold (they were silver originally), and epoxied them together in pairs with a piece of steel welding wire in between across the flat part to hold the three together and a separate wire down from the center of the middle star to hold them up. I put a piece of black heatshrink tubing over the vertical wire, and epoxied two rare earth magnets to the bottom. I cut a stitch or two out of the middle of each of the leotard's shoulder seams, and inserted the magnets through these holes, then slid another magnet onto my shoulder inside the leotard to hold the piece in place. This wasn't entirely satisfactory, as I need to use stronger flat magnets, but it did work well enough.

The medals

The colored rectangles General Xinchub wears are the medals he's received over the years. I studied the strips and came up with a design for the badge:

Howard told me that he'd intended to have the bottom row be a mirror image of the top row's dimensions, but that I'd gotten it closer to the strip than that, and he would take it as I had it.

Making the badge turned out to be quite difficult. I was unable to achieve the precision I wanted in either size or making the edges square with each other. The result passes the 3-foot test, but I want to redo it whenever I can figure out how to cut sheet plastic precisely. The plastic itself was cut from storage bins I found at a local dollar store.

I glued a simple badge pin to the back to hold it on.

The blaster

General Xinchub has not been shown in the strip with a sidearm, but Howard and I agreed that he'd have one, and be quite practiced and deadly with it. After all, he has made a lot of enemies over the years. In this strip from 2002, Sergeant Schlock examines the latest product from Strohl Munitions, the model AP-130 blaster. We decided that that would suit General Xinchub well, as he does not need a flashy sidearm to proclaim his power - just one that is fast and deadly.

Political correctness reared its ugly head when I went to look for pieces to make this. I had a hard time finding a toy gun that looked like a modern pistol. I finally procured one at the other local dollar store. I cut it off forward of the grip, cut away the top to accept a ping-pong ball (which represents the power plant), and glued plastic over the front of the grip where the barrel and trigger had been. I soldered three pieces of 1/16 inch brazing rod to the end of a piece of 5/16 inch brass tubing for the barrel. I painted the barrel silver, the grip gunmetal gray, and the ping-pong ball teal green, glued 1/8-inch gold beads to the ends of the brazing rods, and assembled it all. I added magnets to the left side to hold it to a metal plate I slipped inside the belt of the tights.

The shoes

Most of the uniforms include big boots, as Howard noted. General Xinchub is shown wearing dress oxfords, however. I decided that it would be best in keeping with the strip if I didn't use traditional dress oxfords, but rather work shoes with similar styling and thicker soles. My shoe size is a bit unusual, so my selection was limited, but I finally found a pair of Red Wing style 8618s in my size.

The finished costume

Here's a full-body picture of the finished costume, taken right after the Masquerade:

and one with me and Howard, taken the next morning:

The Masquerade

I'd written a speech, cut down from the speech at the beginning of the movie Patton, that ran about 45 seconds. I'd planned to give it, then march out. It didn't work out that way: I got the first line out, then forgot the rest of it. Damn damn damn. I'd hoped to have a real chance at the overall grand prize, but that lost any hope of it for me.

I did win two awards: one for best workmanship in accessory design and construction, and one for "most daring escape from a 2-dimensional art form". They discussed giving me an award for "best attempt to make a judge recuse himself", as Howard was one of the judges, but didn't.