Day 273: The Turtles Visit Middle Earth

In my last post I mentioned, briefly, my love of Middle-earth and everything it encompasses. Today I'd like to expand a bit on that.

The reason it's been on my mind lately is that my wife, after reading The Hobbit several times in the past made up her mind to finally finish The Lord of the Rings. She's tried before, but never got past The Fellowship of the Ring, and as much of a fan as I am I can totally understand. Tolkien's writing is not everyone's cup of tea; he's very descriptive and his love of lengthy discussions far outweighs the amount of action in the story. But we both love Peter Jackson's film adaptations and the recent trailers for part one of The Hobbit have us very excited to see Martin Freeman as a young Bilbo. So in anticipation of re-entering the epic film version of Middle-earth she decided to finally finish the series, and she did complain about some parts being boring and Tolkien's uncanny ability to kill momentum but overall she really enjoyed it.

As for me? I love it all. The councils, the walking, the endless discussions of old legends, the songs (especially the songs!); all those things that make the books difficult or boring for most people are the things I love. I wasn't always this way, though. My love of Middle-earth is one that has been growing since I first read The Hobbit sometime around 4th Grade. Tolkien's writing is sometimes a bit weighty, especially for a child, but The Hobbit is much more accessible and I've always read things at a higher level than my age. I enjoyed it even if I didn't understand it all and then I moved on to The Lord of the Rings since I had them all in a convenient box set my aunt had given me.

At first I was really only interested in the story. There was so much needless trudging through forests and across plains and talking and singing (those fucking songs!). I remember distinctly giving up on the songs early on and just skipping over them when I first read the books. Or how about Tom Bombadil? What about that guy?

If you've read the books or were a big fan of the movies you likely know Tom Bombadil. Purists crucified Peter Jackson for his omission of the character, while other people were so happy to not have to listen to one of his stupid songs. Personally when I first read the books I hated Tom Bombadil, but now I love that guy! He's such a great character, but if you look at the story objectively he isn't really necessary and I think Peter Jackson did the right thing in leaving him out. I think I'll include a bit of him, though, as this is my blog.

Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!

Ring a dong! hop along! Fal lal the willow!

Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,

Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master:

His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.

Over time I continued to revisit the books and I began to get drawn more into the world rather than just the events of the story. I started to wonder about the Elves and where Sauron came from and all those things fantasy nerds wonder about. I started reading the songs and paying more attention to the smaller, seemingly insignificant details. Eventually I read The Silmarillion which was the most amazing thing that ever happened to someone wanting to know more about Middle-earth and its origins.

The Silmarillion is the Middle-earth bible, and not in the sense that it's a great reference book. It's the Middle-earth bible in the sense that it starts out with the creation and shaping of the world, and moves on through the tales of the ages from there. This is not something I would recommend to a casual fan of the series unless you're really really interested in Elvin genealogy.

So here I am, now (sort-of) an adult with a deep love of all things Middle-earth. I don't really have strong feelings about that world becoming "cool." I know a lot of people hate seeing things they love get popular and bastardized by the mainstream, but that's really never mattered much to me. I'm happy that more people have been exposed to what was my introduction to the fantasy genre, but I realize most people won't take it as far as I have. That's fine. Everyone else can move on and forget about the Hobbits and Ents; I'll continue to love Tolkien's world for my own reasons.

About the picture, it kind of looks like the Fellowship, except there were nine member of the Fellowship and only four Turtles. I just tried to represent the major races matching the personalities of the Turtles as much as possible. Leonardo is men, but in his case specifically a ranger. They're from an old blood-line of the first kings and much more noble than your average Joe. Donatello is an elf (even though that kinda looks like a Gondorian pattern on his vest). I don't really have a good reason for this except that I've always liked the elves. In hindsight he should have been a wizard. Magic is as close as you can get to technology in Middle-earth without being evil. Raph is a dwarf, of course. Red beard mixed with a love of fighting and quick temper? done. Michelangelo, I feel, best represents the Hobbits. Why fight when you can eat, drink, smoke and generally enjoy life to the fullest?

Day 272: Donatello's Birthday Party

Guess what? My birthday was a few days ago. Ordinarily I don't get too excited for my birthday. I don't hate getting older--most of the time I have to do mental calculations to remember exactly how old I am--I just feel a little uncomfortable with the amount of focus people put on me all of a sudden for one day. This is not to say I haven't enjoyed my birthdays. I've had some good times, last night included. I didn't have a party; we just met some friends for dinner. I got lots of cool Spider-Man and TMNT stuff including the new IDW Volume 1 collection of the original comics autographed by Kevin Eastman!

My wife took the theme of the night in a different, but equally nerdy direction (she threw me a TMNT party a few years ago; I'll get to it in a bit). Over the last few years she's really cultivated a love for baking and decorating things and she's gotten pretty damn good. One of my other (many) loves is Tolkien's Middle Earth. I love all of it, not just Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but the entire world and all its lore.--

Before I start rambling about Middle Earth I'm going to stop here and promise to explore this in another post.

--My wife has read The Hobbit several times, just finished Lord of the Rings all the way through for the first time and we're both waaaay excited about the upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit. So this year, she made me a book cake. An awesome book cake that looks like it has real pages and... just look at this thing!

It's huge and awesome and, most importantly, delicious. I chose Strawberry cake without knowing what she was making, so she put a cream cheese layer. Get it? Strawberry's and Cream Cake. As in, "Do you remember the taste of strawberry's and cream, Mr. Frodo?" There are layers of meaning to this cake (as well as just regular layers).

So anyway, I drew this picture of Donatello (me) ready to blow out his candles on his birthday. I'm going off the assumption that the Turtles aren't really brothers in the genetic sense and so they celebrate different birthdays. The others aren't screaming in horror, they're singing "Happy Birthday" to him.

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Instead of writing a big long post about my birthday this year I thought I'd share a few pictures from my TMNT birthday from a few years ago.

 My sweet Donatello cake

Ninja Turtle cupcakes made by my good friend Crystal! The TMNT heads were ring party favors.

My friend graciously let me cut the cake with the broken hilt of Narsil. 

Apparently cutting cakes with a sword is a thing I do. I cut my Spider-Man groom's cake with a samurai sword.

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Here are a few pictures my mom gave me of when I was younger. Proof that I have always loved the turtles.

Me at 5 years-old. Note my coordinated outfit.

 My 6th birthday cake.

6 year-old me at some school carnival thing.

Clearly they didn't have a Donatello cut out.

Day 268: Titanic: A Metaphor

This was my original idea for a TMNT Titanic drawing. It's a metaphor for Leonardo and Raphael's relationship throughout much of the Turtles' history, always butting heads and breaking down their teamwork. Of course in this version Raphael kills Leonardo along with around 1,500 other people, so...

It's not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea.

I also realized that in yesterday's post I erroneously colored the stripe along the deck of the ship red when it should have been white. Please excuse this oversight. I strive for realism in my images and I should have fact checked myself before coloring.

Day 264: Raph on Patrol Alt. Angle (Fan Request)

Yesterday I posted a reader request. Her original request was for Raph on a building overlooking the city. I debated on the point of view for the picture for a while then decided why not do both? So today you get the other side of yesterday's picture. I'm pretty happy with this one.

Day 263: Raph on Patrol (Fan Request)

The word "fan" may be a bit strong; "person who found my Twitter" may be more accurate. So far I haven't taken any requests, but only because no one's made any. She complimented the blog and asked if I would do one so I guess as of now my policy on requests is yes, I'll take them. Some days I have a hard time coming up with ideas, so why not fill the gaps with requests?

Anyway, she asked for, "Raph on the roooftops overlooking the city? I'd be happy with anything Raph though." So here's what I drew. I'm pretty happy with this one, all I can say is perspective has never been my strong suit, along with body shapes or geometric shapes in general or coloring inside the lines.

I infused a bit of Spider-Man into this one with Raph crouching on a terribly ugly gargoyle and I watched the first few episodes of the original cartoon series while drawing it for some good old school inspiration.

*Update* I feel like an idiot, but I was so excited to get a request I forgot to mention the fan that requested this picture.

The pic was done for Jaime and you should go check out her awesome nerdy blog at http://shezcrafti.com

In the future I will make this a more standard process.

Day 163: Raphael Trains With Throwing Stars

All ninjas should use these. They're good defensive weapons if you know how to wield them.

Day 159: Donatello and Raphael Are Incredibly Funny on the Internet

So my friend Shaun and I spend a lot of time online during the day. We also happen to have a fairly similar sense of humor. What this means to us is that we crack each other up all day long on the internet. What this means to all of our friends is they are likely to have a Facebook post highjacked or have their Twitter feeds overrun with tweets from us. I apologize to anyone who's every suffered at our hilarious hands, but we enjoy it too much to stop now.

Day 144: Raphael is the God of War

I love games, but I'm not always up to date on the latest ones because I don't really have the time or the money to spend on them like I wish I could. Recently Shaun bought Modern Warfare 3 and he's been playing that pretty steadily, so after I finished Dragon Age II (for the second time) I borrowed Modern Warfare 2. As ridiculous as it may sound I was interested in the story so I could play the campaign of the new one. I really enjoy FPS games, but I get bored of them pretty quickly. I'm definitely a single-player story-driven kind of guy. I was going to play online a bit until Christmas comes and I (hopefully) get some new games (Uncharted 3 I'm looking at you), but I decided to go backwards and start playing the God of War games again.

Basically, when God of War 3 came out I rushed through the re-release of the first two just to refresh myself on the main plot points and I left a bunch of fairly simple trophies unfinished. I decided I should go back and finish collecting those to kill some time before Christmas, but when I put the disc in I remembered that my PS3 crashed since I played it last and I have no God of War save files on my new Playstation. Now I'm going back through it like it's the first time and actually really enjoying it. This is probably the 4th or 5th time I've actually played the story mode since it first debuted on PS2 and it still holds up pretty well.

Anyway, I drew Raph as the main character from the games, Kratos. I think the parallels are pretty straightforward: red color theme, rage, similar weapons etc...

Day 141: Turkey Pot Pie!

It's the day after Thanksgiving, which is actually my favorite part of Thanksgiving. For one thing people stop giving up on their bullshit pretense to not notice that Christmas is right around the corner--my wife had three Christmas Spotify playlists and would listen to parts of songs, but not whole songs because it wasn't Christmas time yet--but more importantly the day after Thanksgiving means turkey pot pie!

The turkey pot pie after Thanksgiving is one of the few, and possibly only, food related traditions that I get excited about. Thanksgiving itself is just so-so. My wife makes some really great breakfast things for our movie trilogy tradition each year, but as far as traditional Thanksgiving food goes I don't really care. Turkey (except as a lunch meat or smoked drumstick) is usually dry and kind of flavorless and I've never put much stock in most of the side dishes. I enjoy the time off and hanging out with friends and family, but the eating part never did much for me. But every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving my wife buys premade pie crusts and fills them with leftover turkey, stuffing, carrots and gravy and makes the best pot pie ever. She says it's because all of the ingredients that go into the pie took so long to make as separate delicious dishes, but I don't care why it tastes so good. It just does.

Day 134: Ninja Vanish

Ninjas use smoke bombs all the time, right? I need to get me some of those. They seem like they would be damn handy in a jam.

Day 125: Raphael Gives You the Finger

I drew this thinking it would be kinda funny to see Raph giving the finger because he's "cool but rude" but then I realized they only have two fingers and a thumb so he could just as easily be pointing up. Oh well.

Day 110: Why Ninja Turtles Don't Use Battle-Axes

You know, it's funny, but two of the Ninja Turtles use sharp weapons--technically Raph's can be used primarily as defensive weapons, but they do have sharp points--but you never see them kill anyone or spill any blood. I guess that's not a fair assessment, they are a little more graphic in the comics, but in the cartoon they fight robots and in the movies it seems like Leonardo doesn't know that his swords can cut things in addition to blocking attacks.

Anyway, I got to thinking about what it might be like if they switched up to something a little more damaging like a ridiculously over-sized battle axe. I think it would look something like this and I have to admit to chuckling to myself a bit while drawing it. Maybe that's a bit morbid, but what can you do? I am especially a fan of the fact that Raph wasn't expecting to lodge it directly in the Foot Soldier's head, or maybe he was just expecting a robot.

Day 103: Raphael the Phone Specialist

While we were helping our friends move one of their mom's was having phone troubles. Another friend swooped in to help with all of his "talking tech on the phone" experience and handled the situation. Nothing especially exciting came out of this experience, except that he mentioned that the cell phone tech support guy's name was Raphael, so of course I felt the need to put it in a picture. Boom. Done.

Day 87: Flying Jump Kick!

Today is another quick one. We relaxed today, but tomorrow is exciting because it's time for the Andrew Jackson Jihad show at Emo's. So I leave you with Raphael in a classic Ninja Turtle pose of a flying jump kick. You can tell he's going fast because of the speed lines.

Day 82: Raphael Does a One-Handed Hand Stand

There's really no reason behind this picture. I was just thinking of things I could draw and started thinking about all the acrobatic things the turtles can do. Then I started thinking, I bet Raphael can do a one-handed hand stand. So I drew him doing one. That is as deep as this drawing goes into my psyche.

Here's a little behind-the-scenes info on this picture. I turned the paper upside down and drew Raph right-side up, then turned the paper over and voila! he's doing a hand stand.

Day 68: Sad Raphael (TMNT meme # 1)

I know I'm already behind with the posts (as usual it seems) but the next few posts will be kind of light. Don't expect anything longer than a few sentences and the pictures will probably be pretty sparse. I'm working on a project that will (hopefully) be amazing and I need to finish in the next two days. Time is pretty short, but I feel like I can get it done. I'll definitely we posting a blog on my project assuming it turns out alright. If not I'll probably never mention it again and you will forever wonder what I was talking about.

For today's picture I draw a TMNT version of an internet meme. Actually, I think I'll make this a running project. All the turtles will get their own memes. Today is Raphael doing his best "Sad Keanu" impersonation.

Day 63: Raphael is Dexter

I was kind of at a loss for what to draw today so I reimagined a promo image I saw the other day for Dexter season 6. I figured if any of the turtles were likely to be a serial killer it would be Raph. If you've never seen Dexter I highly recommend it. It's coming back in just a few weeks and I'm very excited for it to start.

Day 42: Raphael Fights a Bear!

There are a couple of things that led me to draw this.

1) Bears are awesomely powerful and could probably kill you without even realizing you were there, yet somehow they trick people into thinking they're adorable and cuddly like a big dog.

2) Ethan Nicolle (co-creator and artist of Axe Cop fame) recently started a new web-comic called Bearmageddon. It's seriously awesome and I love his art style. It's not Axe Cop so don't come in expecting poop jokes and people dressed as babies (though it's only 5 pages in, so who knows what the future holds?), but it's already just as entertaining in a different way. In one of the recent pages one of the characters posed the question, "Can a man kill a bear with one punch?" And that brings me to number three.

3) I have an ancestor who used to hunt bears using only a knife with some accounts crediting him killing more than 80 bears in close combat.

I've known about this ancestor for a while. He was pretty famous back in the days of the good 'ol Civil War and a few family member have been named after him. What I didn't know until fairly recently was that he could have been a serious contender for Bad Ass of the Century.

His name was General Wade Hampton III and here are a few highlights of his pretty awesome life.*

He was born in Charleston, South Carolina to one of the wealthiest planters in the South. They also happened to own the largest number of slaves (not really a ringing endorsement for a bad-ass, but it was the South in the early 1800's). He came from a line of military bad-asses that served in the American Revolution as well as the War of 1812.

As previously mentioned he was quite an outdoorsman and enjoyed horseback riding and hunting. Specifically hunting American Black Bears. With a knife. And nothing else.

He studied law, but never practiced it, presumably because he only needed to understand the law enough to become a powerful vigilante in the Southern United States.

At the start of the Civil War he opposed the division of the U.S., but being an honorable man he stayed loyal to his home state of South Carolina and resigned his post in the U.S. Senate (oh yeah, he was a Senator, did I mention that?) He then enlisted as a private in the SC Militia, but the Governor insisted he take a Colonel's commision even though he had absolutely no military experience. He formed his own legion, because there were no other legions bad ass enough to back him up and he personally financed all of their weaponry.

After numerous battles and promotions he led what became known as the "Beefsteak Raid" in which he and his troops captured over 2400 heads of cattle and 300 prisoners behind enemy lines.

He was injured five times during the war. Once was a severe injury to the foot, but who needs a foot when you have a horse? He stayed mounted while the wound was treated even though he was still under heavy fire. Another time he received a saber cut to the back of the head while rushing a soldier from 200 yards who was pointing a rifle at him the entire time. He received two more cuts to the front of his head and was only taken out of the battle when he received shrapnel to his hip.

After the war he was offered a nomination for governor and was a strong favorite to win, except that, oh yeah, he didn't want to be governor; he was afraid people in the North would be a suspicious of a Confederate general seeking office only months after the war ended. Regardless he was so popular he had to campaign to tell people not to vote for him.

Later when he did decide to run his supporters were called "Red Shirts" and were known for their violent tactics, much like soccer hooligans I would imagine. In order to secure absolute privacy he used a local brothel as a campaign headquarters and to hold meetings. That election was thought to be the bloodiest gubernatorial election in the history of the state and both sides claimed victory. In fact for six months there were two governments until the South Carolina Supreme Court declared Hampton as the winner.

Afterward he was known as the "Savior of South Carolina" and was reelected. He broke his leg shortly into his second term and it eventually had to be amputated. It's OK, though, because on the day his leg was amputated he was also elected to the Senate even though he refused to announce his intention to run. If you're keeping count that's two--almost three--positions of power he was given without even asking.

If you're ever near the South Carolina State House, or the U.S. Capitol you can see a couple of statues of him erected after his death in 1902.

He's also been used in several works of historical fiction. If you watch Gone With the Wind you can see it's his name that signed the letter to Scarlet telling her that her first husband has died in the war. The other works are just books, so you won't be reading those anyway.

That's probably enough about my ancestors for one post. I hope I enlightened you as to how awesome my genes are.

*I got all of my facts from the Wikipedia article on General Wade Hampton III, so take that for what you will.

Day 38: Introducing... Casey Jones *Updated*

Tonight is the screening of the Casey Jones movie I mentioned a few posts ago. I'm not really sure what to expect, I just hope that it's fun. I'm not really a purist when it comes to any kind of adaptations or reinventions so I won't be looking to pick apart this movie. I'd rather just enjoy watching someone else's vision of these characters.

The wife and I are going in costume because it just so happens that we dressed as Casey Jones and April O'Neil for Halloween last year. She's actually fixing her hair for her costume right now and I'll be putting on my sweatpants and cut-off jean jacket in just a little bit to head down the to the theater.

Here's a pic of what we looked like on Halloween. I made the mask out of corrugated plastic, covered it with white paper, used a sharpie to make the lines then added elastic to hold it on. It's not super comfortable, but it was cheap and gets the point across.

In honor of the character I drew Casey Jones and Raph in the style of how they looked when they met in the original live action movie. I always loved that a giant anthropomorphic turtle becomes totally inconspicuous in New York City as long as he's wearing a trench coat and a fedora. Seems reasonable. Also Casey Jones has one of the more bum-like super hero costumes of any comic book character I've ever seen.

I'll probably update this post later with my review of the show, but for now I'll just leave you with the trailer again.

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 The Casey Jones movie. Where to begin? First of all the wife and I went in costume and we got there waaaaay early. No one was even at the theater yet so we killed some time at Half Price Books. In costume.

We headed back to the theater about an hour before the show and the lobby started filling up pretty quickly. We get some compliments on our costumes and met another Casey Jones. We took some pictures with people which was cool but soon enough it was time to head into the theater.

The movie itself wasn't very long. I believe the run time was somewhere around 30-40 minutes. I wasn't quite sure what to expect at first. The trailer makes it look pretty gritty, but there was some obvious comedy to the film. I liked Hilarion Banks' Casey Jones a lot. He did an excellent job portraying Casey as a somewhat cocky hot-head who just gets tired of getting pushed around and decides to stand up for himself and make a difference for those who can't.

Things did take a surprisingly (and enjoyably) dark turn after he suits up for the first time. This Casey Jones is not about mercy. He has no qualms about killing some street thugs--including a kid who looks an awful lot like Danny from the original film (though he would be much older now)--to make his point.

Michelangelo shows up part of the way through Casey's night of vengeance and they sort of parody/reenact the introduction scene between Raph and Casey in the original film. It was a lot of fun and one of the coolest things was that they got the original voice of Michelangelo (from the 1990 film) to reprise his role.

Although none of the other turtles are ever seen (except for a pair of hands) you do hear voices and I thought they did a really great job with the Turtles' dialog and voice work. There were a lot of "in-jokes" ("That's just Raph. You'll have to excuse him. He's cool, but rude"). One voice in particular I want to mention was Polaris Banks--who also wrote and directed the film--as Donatello. Corey Feldman has a very distinct Donatello voice (at least to me) and I was convinced they either somehow got him to read for the film, or cobbled together lines taken from the other films because his voice was so spot-on.

I could go on with a spoiler-filled rant about all the things I loved about this film, but instead I'll just hit a few highlights.

The stunt guys and fight choreographers did an excellent job. I liked the use of both the Purple Dragons and the Foot Clan. The fights were lengthy, entertaining and at times pretty brutal.

During one of the fight scenes we were treated to the biggest WTF moment in the movie. I won't spoil it except to say a character I would have thought extremely unlikely to make the jump to live-action makes an appearance.

We were also treated to a bright-yellow-suited April O'Neil giving news-story-narration, some amazing art pieces for the credits, the original film's theme reused during this movie (to great nostalgic effect) as well as a great new single by Johnny October called "Goongala!" during the credits.

The film premieres on the internet September 17th at CaseyJonestheMovie.com so go check it out. Seriously. It's fuckin awesome.

Day 33: Raphael Gives Blood

Today I gave blood. I've done this every 8 weeks at my work for the last two and a half years or so. I don't particularly enjoy the experience and I don't do it because I have a giant ego and want to feel good about myself for being so selfless. No, mostly I do it because it's a guaranteed 30-45 minute break from work complete with complementary snacks. I'd like to think that if my company stopped doing blood drives every eighth Tuesday I would take myself down to a clinic and donate on my own time, but I'm not ready to swear to that just yet.

My experience today was especially fun because I had a trainee sticking me. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against trainees. Everyone has to start somewhere. But today I learned what it feels like when someone can't find your vein and has to move the needle around in your arm. *Spoiler alert!* It's not pleasant. I'm a little worried that I'm going to have a massive bruise there tomorrow, but to be perfectly frank I don't really care. What I do care about is the bandage. They had several color wraps, but the lady fixing me up didn't even ask what color I wanted! I prefer purple because having a purple medical wrap around my elbow puts me just a little bit closer to being Donatello. Blue wold have been my second choice, but no, she just slapped a red one on me like it was no big deal, like it didn't even matter!

Well, that informed my decision of who I was going to put in the chair for today's drawing. I don't hate the red bandage and I actually do like Raphael, it's just that he's not my first choice, you know? At least Don's in there as the doctor. I figure out of all of them he's the most likely candidate for a medical license.

Did you know that Ninja Turtle blood is only good for two things? Number one: replenishing lost blood in another Ninja Turtle, and number two: inducing a beserker-like rage when ingested by dwarves. Don't believe me? Try it next time you find a vial of Ninja Turtle blood in your D&D campaign.

While doing some research for this post I learned some other interesting things about human blood types.

• Type A+ is the blood type most sought after by alien abduction groups. If you have type A+ blood you are 3% more likely to be abducted by an alien (human or extraterrestrial).
• Type A- (my type) is prominent in powerful wizards. Though people with other blood types may also be wizards, those with type A- display an average of 30% more magical power when compared to wizards of other blood types using similar spells.
• Type B+ is less dense than other blood types making it more buoyant. If you have type B+ blood it's like having +5 to your swimming skill.
• Type B- is sought after above all other types by vampires. If you have type B- blood you are 45% more likely to be attacked by a vampire, 55% if you work nights and 85% if you live in Eastern Europe. If you have type B- blood and you work nights anywhere in Eastern Europe it's more likely that you are a vampire than not.
• Type AB+ is the closest thing to elf blood human beings can have. It's believed by many prominent scientists that the AB+ blood type is only found in people with some elfin ancestry.
• Type AB- is resistant to Lycanthropy. People with type AB- blood are 13% less likely to turn into a werewolf if bitten by one according to recent studies.
• Type O+ is commonly found in people with a genetic predisposition to write fan fiction. Even if the desire is never expressed it is still likely hidden deep within the heart and soul of a person with Type O+ blood.
• Type O- is genetically linked to Solanum, the "zombie virus." In 100% of the recorded zombie outbreaks "patient zero" had type O- blood. It hasn't been established what the extent of the link is yet, but if you have type O- blood you may well be the epicenter of the next outbreak.

I hope I've enlightened you with my bit of trivia. So do your part to keep America safe from vampire attacks, go out and donate blood willingly so they don't have to come and take it, especially if you're type B-.