Comics, With A Twist

"IT NEEDS a bigger horn and more eye makeup," Tip Flannery said, eyeing a 5-foot-tall pink My Little Pony on wheels.

Flannery is the captain of the Vaudevillains NYB, a 4-year-old Comics Brigade that is headquartered out of the art collective Space 1026.

The pony's name is Seymour.

And, he will be ridden by the spirit of William Penn. Naturally.

The Vaudevillains' theme this year is the Philly Phantasy Phorest and, along with Billy Penn and Seymour, their motley crew will include trees made of purple dip-dyed stretch velvet with neon-yellow leaves and a menagerie of real and imaginary animals.

If the Vaudevillains aren't your father's Mummers' brigade, then they're the Mummers' brigade of your cousin who went to art school and explained to you what postmodern means. It is the kind of troupe that knows they want to include unitards (think: Spandex body suit) and synthpop (think: cheese-tastic New Wave-influenced music) in their sketch before they decide on a theme.

"A lot of people are born into [the Mummers]. . . . Since we haven't been a brigade our entire lives, we just make up what we want to be," said co-captain Jay Roselius, who remixed the music the Vaudevillains will perform to, a piece by New Age prog rocker Mike Oldfield. But Roselius admitted, "We're becoming less unique because there are more groups like us sprouting up."

Daily News columnist Dan Gross, who was a first-time strutter with the Vaudevillains last year, said there are two contingents within the group that mix and mingle: The legitimate artists who see the parade as an elaborate collective art project, and the other members who just want to put glitter on things and party. (Gross is part of the latter faction.) But all strutters make their own costumes, beginning with a big push at a noon-to-midnight "sew-a-thon," which takes place in Space 1026's Chinatown studio.

Groups of Vaudevillains gathered in the freezing studio on a recent Sunday to stitch, cut and screen-print their costumes. Members floated in and out, helping paint elaborately-colored banners. Others sat in a circle chatting while cutting patterns from donated fabric.

In a hallway that reached to the back of the studio, Jesse Goldstein and Molly Fair were screen-printing. Instead of getting to be an animal or a tree, Goldstein and Fair will represent the evil ooze army that exists as a result of fracking, the controversial method of extracting natural gas.