Discussion
Our Deluxe Edition Filibus #SkyPirate action figure is now available!
https://www.mountaintowntoys.com/product/filibus-sky-pirate-fun-size-heroes/
It's injection molded in the southeastern US by me and Sundog, and hand painted by my wife. It's packaged on a printed canvas cardback with original artwork (by me!) and a resealable bubble.
This is a thread.
Filibus is a gender fluid sky pirate, who originally appeared in a 1915 Italian science fiction film.
The film is available from #NewEllijayTelevision along with *lots* of other Sky Pirates films on our Sky Pirate playlist: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/p/nQmSoz1U7RUUVqSLQdeGn2?playlistPosition=6&resume=true
Filibus is also the star of my ongoing science fiction serial The Mysterious Air Pirates, which is available in print and digitally.
Print: https://www.mountaintowntoys.com/product-tag/pulp/
Digital: https://itch.io/c/6972047/the-mysterious-air-pirates
They're a *remarkable* figure in early film, and they were a huge inspiration on so many of the things I've done since first discovering the film.
I made a landing page for our Sky Pirates stuff: https://www.mountaintowntoys.com/sky-pirates/
This includes lots of links to Sky Pirate literature and films, as well as an explanation of why I'm so obsessed with the concept.
To quote myself:
These works span four decades, three continents, and countless technological transformations. What unites them is a shared conviction: that the sky is not the exclusive domain of states and capitalists, that flight can be seized by those below, that the airship can become a vessel of liberation rather than control.
The sky pirate tradition is not monolithic. It contains anarchist bombers and feminist adventurers, Soviet collectives and queer outlaws, dime-novel inventors and pulp avengers. But across this diversity runs a common thread: the belief that technology, in the right hands, can overturn the established order.
We who produce these toys make no claim to neutrality. We stand with the pirates. We believe that another world is possible, and that it may be reached by climbing, by flying, by seizing the means of ascent and pointing them toward the horizon.
We’ve found inspiration among these stories, to write and tell our own stories, to make toys, and to create a new world.
Keep watching the skies.
Also on that landing page, offered for sale for the first time outside of a couple of in person appearances, is our Sky Pirate Manifesto poster.
I wrote this, taking inspiration from the Futurist manifesto.
The Futurists were not good people, but they were fascinating.
This one takes some explanation.
I've always had a perverse fascination with the Italian futurists. They were artists and poets, often very progressive but also frequently as regressive as you can imagine, who were eventually seduced by and subsumed into the Italian Fascist movement.
They stood at odds with the fascist in many ways. The fascists were desperate for a return to some lost glory, the futurists conversely were most concerned with leaving that old world behind.
The Russian futurists, Soviet futurists, took the basic ideas of Italian futurism and divorced them from the fascism and senseless violence, leaving something significantly more interesting.
As I've explored this history, this poetry, these paintings and films, and thought about how the Futurist movement was building at the same time that Filibus was produced...
Well, I was inspired.
What happens when you take the idea that art and poetry are political, and that the politics of art and poetry can bring about the future, but remove from that the idea of SPEED and PROGRESS by any means necessary?
What happens when you bring humanity back into your artistic statement of political purpose?
What happens if you replace the dictatorial speed and gunfire obsession of the futurists with an anarchist, humanist embrace of the slow?
Hence my #SkyPirate manifesto.
@ajroach42 hmmm. Id like to put this in one of my zines!
Anyway, I'm very proud of where our Sky Pirate toys have reached, and where they're headed.
We have a lot more coming. New sculpts for most of our existing characters, more accessories, more fiction, a podcast, playsets, keshi. If I get especially lucky, maybe even a web comic.
I'm putting this time in because we are living through a moment that very much rhymes with the world of the 1910s.
All over, I see progress. I see acceptance and joy and love. I see art that pushes boundaries. I see #revolutionaryJoy
But I also see retribution, reaction, attack, regression. I see petty people, scared by the promise of the future, trying to take control, trying to steal the future. Trying to use technological progress to centralize and control rather than to liberate.
We are, once again, standing on the precipice of a new world. We are building it, fighting over what form it will take. We've been in this position before, and it's worth taking some inspiration from those who came before us.
I produced a commercial for these sky pirate toys:
