Plaseebo x Planet-X – SUM Handpaints at Five Points Fest (6.2 – 6.3)

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The second coming of SUM hits Brooklyn at the Five Points Festival with the release of several handpainted one-off editions of Plaseebo’s vengeful giant turtle beast produced by Planet-X [booth #328]. First released in small numbers as a polyurethane resin back around 2006, the new SUM is cast in soft vinyl and appears to retain the original’s tremendous detail especially in terms of the accumulated junk and debris embedded in his body.

The Five Points  one-offs are hand-painted by  Bob Conge (Plaseebo), feature an integrated color-changing LED light, and are hand-signed.  Look for the first production run drop in July.  Be sure to hit the jump for SUM’s origin story.

The Legend of Sum

Driving home from the local red neck bar one moonlit summer night, Roy swerves his pick-up toward a dark shape that is slowly moving along side the road. A loud CRACK shatters the darkness as the front tire breaks the giant snapping turtles’ shell in two, right down the center. The great snapper rolls down the embankment into the stream and Roy’s laughing fades as the truck turns to cross the bridge to his shabby farm house across the stream.

The turtle, floating belly up is carried downstream to the other side and is swept into a quiet eddy where he sinks watching the moon fade from yellow to blood red through the darkening water. This small pool cut into the bank of the stream was at the back Roy’s property and he used it as his personal dump site. The water caught in this hole became a terrible toxic soup of motor oil, fertilizer, broken toys, bones and entrails of many slaughtered animals, rusty tools and who knows what else.

Over the next few months, a strange transformation took place in this evil chowder as it baked in the summer heat. A creature of revenge, born of cruelty and neglect slid its way out of the sickening mess one dark September night. Roy’s body was never found, nor could anyone explain the slime trail from the bedroom through the field behind the house.

Over the years that followed, other neglectful farmers vanished on moonless nights and folks reported vague sightings of a creature that seamed to be cobbled together from a collection of garbage, an old doll, bone, rotted skin, and broken tools, with a large snapping turtle skull for a head. They call him “SUM”.