Superhero portraits composited from faces of actors who played them

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/10/superhero-portraits-composited.html

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I LOVE that Wolverine is just a Jackman portrait. That’s freaking awesome bub.

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I am LOLing

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Which makes me wonder…do they weight them by the number of times that each actor has played them?

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I like that inclusion, too - though it would also have been interesting if they had included Dougray Scott in there - since he was originally cast, but due to conflicts had to bow out. It wouldn’t be all that different.

It’s interesting to see how some parts have really been played by similar looking actors, as you can see the specific actors in the composite face. (Unlike, say, Doctor Who, where it looks like none of the actors. In fact, it’d be impossible to tie that face to the show on its own.) Also, it’s interesting how some of the comic book characters, where there was some diversity of appearance in the actors, the end results look more like the illustrations used in the comics. Like individually they couldn’t find someone who perfectly matched the illustration, but collectively they could, because the comic illustration is sort of an averaged image of faces to begin with.

It’s not accurate though.

Young Wolverine was played by Troye Sivan in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, even if most of us would like to forget it ever existed.

And talking of films we would like to forget, isn’t Catwoman a little too white?

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CG is getting scary-good — that one of Wolverine is just uncanny.

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to be honest I am ok with them leaving off child actors playing the young version of anyone. The issue there is it would skew the composite far to much due to the shear size variance.

Keeping it to adults is fine.

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I’m a little disappointed in the Peter Parker /Spiderman composite. It looks a little old for someone whose character started as a teenager.

Is it just me, or does the Jack Ryan composite look like Luke Perry?

And yet you can still look it it and say “Yeah, that guy is definitely The Doctor.” That one was my favorite.

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Pretty bland, except for Huge Jacked Man, of course.

See, to me, he looks familiar in a vague, I-must-have-seen-him-on-BBC kind of way, because he’s super-English looking, but I wouldn’t have associated him with the show without the caption. He looks like someone who would be playing a British politician (not anyone in particular, just a generic politician).

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I’m surprised how much alike they all look.

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I quite agree given most superhero movies involve origin stories (one more time!) Adding lots of child actors in (with different facial ratios) would quickly reach manga-super-deformed levels and breach the uncanny valley.

@the_borderer’s other point about the amalgam skin tone of Catwoman is still valid, and deserves a signal boost.
Seven actors have played Catwoman, live-action. No Halle Berry? No Eartha Kitt?

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(@quorihunter To be completely clear, I know that you weren’t commenting on the Catwoman half of @the_borderer’s comment, and I’m not suggesting your comment above said anything about that.

My flabber is just that ghasted about the Catwoman photo.)

I wouldn’t have associated him, either, but if someone had told me “this is the actor who will play the next Doctor,” I would have thought “good choice.” And I think that points to how well-developed he is as a character that he’s distinguishable in spite of the fact that, as written, he assumes a new form with each generation. The other characters are all supposed to have fixed appearances, yet there’s nothing about most of their composites that scream “Peter Parker” or “Bruce Wayne.” They’re all more or less the same character—“good-looking person who fights crime.”

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Is it worth noting that the original, um, group portrait at geek.com:

…Hannibal Lecter lies in that position?

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That’s… Odd.

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I hear there’s this guy who runs a school in upstate New York who can selectively erase memories if you make out with him. (There’s also a guy from Metropolis who can do the same thing depending which version you consider canonical.)

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