You've Got Red On You

Shaun of the Dead is probably my favorite zombie movie of recent years.

George A. Romero's original 'Night of the Living Dead' from 1968 is still probably the scariest zombie flick.  Others have been fun but not as creepy.  And there've been a lot of them.  So 'Shaun of the Dead' stands out of the pack, a comedy with horror overtones instead of a horror movie with comedic overtones.  The movie's hilarious but manages to be scary at times too.  Zombie's in general at the moment stand out of the pack, in a time when Vampires and Werewolves are getting their teeth pulled and their six-packs exposed, someone decided horror should be romantic, but it's a lot harder to put sparkles on a zombie.  Earlier this year they did try with 'Warm Bodies' though...so the zombie thing might be wearing a little thin now too.  Even if every incarnation is good in it's own right you can definitely have too much of a good thing but 'Shaun' beat a lot of them to the punch and rightfully so.  As you may have guessed, I rewatched it recently and drew this a couple days later.  Done with markers and red Uniball.

Horror Fan Art

The last couple months have been spent mostly working on a couple freelance gigs and trying to finish up a few odds and ends on some other projects of my own...one of which is Cowman related so keep your eyes peeled for that, things are gonna start shaking up over there in the coming months.  Now I'm working on a graphic novel idea I've been playing with for a long time...I had hoped to actually start actively working on that before Christmas but Pork Cops and everything else took longer than I'd thought and here we are in May.  I did manage to etch out some random drawing time though to do these two quick colour pieces of fan art.

The Creature!!!!!  Was watching a lot of old horror movies last month and definitely one of Universal's best was the original 'Creature from the Black Lagoon,' which was also one of their last notable ones of the genre.  I kinda wanted to do my own thing with his look but when I was putting pencil to paper I couldn't bring myself to mess with such an iconic character.  My two big new contributions were flaring out the fins on his forearms a little bit so they could almost double as weapons and an idea that I'm kinda proud of it I took the bones out of his legs, so they function almost more like tentacles or double fish tails.  When he's on land they'd get him around like legs but in the water they'd move more freely and fish like...which seems appropriate for a half man half fish missing link.

And probably one of if not THE best micro budget movies to ever come from Roger Corman is the original "Little Shop of Horrors."  It's one of the first true horror comedies and it works well on both levels although it's definitely strongest as a comedy.  It also features Jack Nicholson in a hilarious cameo as a masochistic dental patient who is only there for the opportunity to feel the pain of the drill.  I don't think this was Jack's first role but it was definitely close to that, he's so young he's almost totally unrecognizable, which didn't make him easy to draw.  I kept trying to incorporate his famous prominent features but then he looked like Jack from 20 years later and not the character that bellowed, "No novocaine!  It dulls the senses!"

Merry Christmas! Shitter was full!

There's not a lot to say about this one.  Just about everybody watches this this time of year and with good reason.  It never get's....get's...sorry...memories not what it used to be with this steel plate in my head.  Whenever someone fires up the microwave I piss my pants and forget my name for about half an hour or so.  I used to eat Squirrels but I found out they were high in cholesterol.

Where do you think you're going?  Nobody's leaving!  Nobody's walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas.  No, no.  We're all in this together.  This is a full-blown, four alarm holiday emergency here.  We're gonna press on, and we're gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny fucking Kaye.  And when Santa squeezes his fat white ass down that chimney tonight, he's gonna find the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse.

Classic.  Happy Holidays everybody.

50 Years of Bond

I'm a 007 fan, as many people are.  This year marks not only the release of the 23rd Bond film but the 50th birthday of the James Bond film franchise and as a result the character and the movies have been discussed a lot lately.  I'm even set to help my photographer friend, Brad of BWD Photography with a Bond tribute photo shoot.  All this stuff coalesced and I drew this poster you see here.

When I envisioned this thing I got pretty excited but it was a little bittersweet.  I had to move a project I've been struggling to get rolling on to the back burner to do this.  Sometimes you have to take advantage of an idea while it's fresh or you won't do it all.  Can you spot and name all the stuff?  I won't do all the work for you but here's a list of everything included in this poster.  See if you can find it all.  Don't be afraid to imdb if you have to, but try to do it without.

Astin Martin - from Goldfinger(1964) and beyond
Tatiana Romanova - from From Russia With Love(1963)
Domino - from Thunderball(1965)
A snake - from Live And Let Die(1973)
Torture chair and knotted rope - from Casino Royale(2006)
Crocodile - from Live And Let Die(1973)
Nick Nack - from The Man With The Golden Gun(1974)
Submarine - from Thunderball(1965)
The Golden Girl - from Goldfinger(1964)
Martini Shaker - from any of them
Missiles - from most of them
Tiffany Case - from Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
May Day - from A View To A Kill(1985)
Tracy Bond - from On Her Majesty's Secret Service(1969)
Blofeld - from You Only Live Twice(1967)
Skis - from The Spy Who Loved Me(1977)
Scottish Flag - not from any of them really, but he was born in Scotland
Jaws - from The Spy Who Loved Me(1977) and Moonraker(1979)
Largo - from Thunderball(1965)
Vodka - from any of them
Plenty O'Toole - from Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
Space Shuttle - from Moonraker(1979)
A shark - from License To Kill(1989)
Playing cards and Poker chips - from many of them
Oddjob - from Goldfinger(1964)
Doctor No - from Dr No(1962)
Grant - from From Russia With Love(1963)
Auric Goldfinger - from Goldfinger(1964)
Francisco Scaramanga - from The Man With The Golden Gun(1974)
Pussy Galore - from Goldfinger(1964)
Octopus - from Octopussy(1983)
Octopussy - from Octopussy(1983)
Solitaire - from Live And Let Die(1973)
Q - from From Russia With Love(1963) all the way to The World Is Not Enough(1999)
Laser watch - from Goldeneye(1995)
Honey Ryder - from Dr. No(1962)
Vesper Lynd - Casino Royale(2006)
Moneypenny(Lois Maxwell) - from Dr. No(1962) to A View To A Kill(1985)
M(Judi Dench) - from Goldeneye(1995) to present
M(Bernard Lee) - from Dr No(1962) to Moonraker(1979)
Jetpack - from Goldfinger(1964)
Felix Leiter(Jeffrey Wright) - from Casino Royale(2006)
James Bond, modeled mainly on Sean Connery - from Dr No(1962) to Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
Satellite - from Diamonds Are Forever(1971)
Helicopter - from From Russia With Love(1963)
Martini glass - from all of them.  The man liked to drink.
Gun barrel - from every single one of them.

"Here's to swimmin' with bowlegged women."

Show me the way to go home.  I'm tired and I wanna go to bed.  I had a little drink about an hour ago and it's gone straight to my head.

Jaws is one of my favourite all time movies.  And Quint is one of my all time favourite movie characters.  And his portrayal by Robert Shaw may also be one of the best all time performances.  His Indianapolis speech is a work of art both as a performance and a piece of screenwriting.  A speech that was apparently rewritten and reworked more times than the famously buggy mechanical shark named Bruce.  The story goes that Shaw himself rewrote the monologue before filming the scene.

37 years later and Bruce the shark still looks fake as hell.  But the movie is so well written, directed and acted that you still don't care.  It'll always be one of the best.  I rewatched it for the 8 billionth time a couple weeks ago and I drew this afterward.

So...eleven hundred men go into the water.  Three hundred and sixteen come out and the shark took the rest.  June 29th, 1945.  Anyway we delivered the bomb...

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein

For years I've said I wanted to read Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.  As a kid Frank was my favourite of the classic movie monsters...I went as him for Halloween once or twice.  The whole idea behind the crazy doctor and his monster is cool and creepy...and the fact that it was written by a nineteen year old in the nineteenth century just made the book more intriguing.  I finally got around to reading it this month.  I always knew the original Universal Pictures version of the story differed from the novel but I was still pretty surprised at just how different.  Even the movie entitled "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein" as I recall has a lot of changes in it although it's definitely closer than the Karloff version.  The book moves pretty slow actually and tends to wander on tangents that aren't always necessary.  I thought it bounced back and forth between painfully dull and genuinely freaky.  Shelly's descriptions of the monster are quite vivid and that's maybe what I was most surprised by when I read the book.  I don't think Frankenstein's monster has ever been depicted on film they way he's described in the book.  I drew this while I was reading it...

Here's how Shelly herself describes the wretch.  "His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing: his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriences only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips."

I figured if his skin was translucent from being stretched so thin then it would have been difficult to keep the ends together when sewing.  So I made sure to show some exposed meat beneath the skin at the seams where the stitches are barely holding him together.  It was a myth for years and years that your hair and finger/toe nails continued to grow after you died and I wondered if that's where Mary Shelly's idea for his flowing black hair stemmed from so I gave him long claw like finger nails.  I also skewed some of his parts so  he wasn't quite put together right, which is why his abs kinda stick to the one side.  I also cut a hole over his heart and then stitched it back up cuz I figured a delicate organ like that might've required frequent reaccess while he was being built.  And I reasoned that he might not have a lot of cartilage left in him either which is why I pulled his nose back like a skull.  This isn't a bad drawing but I think if I were designing him to appear in a movie or something I'd take a couple more passes.  I'd probably experiment with the stitching a bit, maybe see how it would look if it were more excessive and I'd definitely play more with his posture.

Of course...there's still a lot to be said for the classic...