Tag Archives: Experiment

Funky Frankie

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It’s that time of year when I have a tra­di­tion of doing some kind of Franken­stein imagery. Right after I fin­ished the one I did for last year, this one came to me in a fore­head-slap­ping “D’oh!” moment.

Unlike last year’s image, this is a real song, as some of you will know. The Edgar Win­ter Group’s “Franken­stein” is one of the coolest rock instru­men­tals of the ’70s. I’ll give you moment to check it out here, if you haven’t heard it before.

…Okay, you’re back now? “Franken­stein” was a big hit and actu­al­ly made it to #1 on the charts. My under­stand­ing is that in record­ing and fig­ur­ing out the song, the band end­ed up hav­ing to do a lot of phys­i­cal edit­ing of the song parts. Today, that’s just a mat­ter of hit­ting a but­ton or two. Back then, you had to lit­er­al­ly take a razor blade to the record­ing tape to cut it apart, then tape it back togeth­er again. With all the var­i­ous tape pieces lying around the stu­dio wait­ing to be pieced back togeth­er, the band’s drum­mer observed that the song had become “like Franken­stein.” The name stuck.

I knew what I kind of want­ed the illus­tra­tion to look like, but think­ing about col­or was anoth­er thing. Then I remem­bered that for awhile now, I’d been intrigued by the idea of try­ing some­thing with flu­o­res­cent col­ors, like a black­light poster. It struck me that this was the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to try that out, so here you go!

Hap­py Halloween!

Captain Saturn Giant!

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Some of you may rec­og­nize this as the cov­er of Odd Comics’ Cap­tain Sat­urn Giant, pub­lished in the ear­ly ’60s. Odd Comics as a pub­lish­er seems to have been large­ly for­got­ten these days, and it takes a lot of dig­ging to find their comics, but it’s worth the effort.

Okay, I con­fess: the above was a lie! It’s just a fake com­ic cov­er, by me. I’ll tell you the truth as to how this came about.

Over on LinkedIn, the very tal­ent­ed Thomas N. Perkins IV post­ed a draw­ing he’d done on the first page of a copy of his book If…. Thomas does a lot of cool stuff, but some­thing about this draw­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly caught my eye. It had a sort of Sil­ver Age-look­ing super­hero char­ac­ter, with a big mon­ster behind him. I com­ment­ed on how I liked it, and in Thomas’ reply, he said it was “Cap­tain Sat­urn and his pet Gulglammakus.”

Some­how, their being named plant­ed a seed in my brain. And sud­den­ly, I was envi­sion­ing Cap­tain Sat­urn fea­tured in a Sil­ver Age extra-length Giant com­ic. I told Thomas about this, and with his bless­ing, I went to work on this cover.

Thomas’ orig­i­nal draw­ing was in black and white with gray tones, and he want­ed to fig­ure out the col­or scheme for Cap­tain Sat­urn for me first, which I then trans­lat­ed into the Sil­ver Age comics col­or palette.

His response when I gave him a pre­view of the fin­ished cov­er was, “I won’t lie, I am sure this is a book I would’ve read as a kid.” I’m very pleased to get that kind of reac­tion. And I’ll con­fess, this is the sort of thing that would’ve caught my eye too. And prob­a­bly still would!

For a time after grad­u­at­ing col­lege, I used to have this recur­ring dream: I’d walk into a comics shop I’d nev­er been in, and dis­cov­er all these real­ly cool comics that I’d nev­er seen before! The sad part though is that I could nev­er remem­ber any­thing about them after I woke up, or maybe I’d have tried to cre­ate those comics myself. Maybe one of them might have been some­thing like Cap­tain Saturn!

Cap­tain Sat­urn is ™ & © Thomas N. Perkins IV. Thomas, thanks much for let­ting me play with your toys for a minute!

Exhibiting Craft in Mining

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Here’s some­thing different!

It’s not new (done back in 2013, appar­ent­ly!), but I was recent­ly look­ing through some old files on my com­put­er that I had­n’t exam­ined in awhile, and it occurred to me that some out there might find this interesting.

This came about because my old­est nephew (Michael) reached out, told me he and his best bud were want­i­ng to do a pod­cast togeth­er about Minecraft, and he asked if I could do some cov­er art to rep­re­sent it. My nieces and nephews rarely ask any­thing of me; what kind of an uncle would I be if I said, “no”?

Michael sent me images of their in-game avatars (his is on the left). I know very lit­tle about games, but I thought it would be a fun chal­lenge, and some­thing dif­fer­ent to do. So I did some research into dif­fer­ent approach­es to art done for Minecraft, and fig­ured out a direc­tion to go with it that I thought would be fun. This was the result.

What hap­pened with the pod­cast? I hon­est­ly don’t know. But that’s not the point. The point is that I got to be the cool uncle!

Love you, Michael!

Seven Santas

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Illustration of Seven SantasThis was an idea I’d had since last year that I want­ed to try out, but did­n’t quite get around to mak­ing it a real­i­ty. Too much else was going on. I’ve exper­i­ment­ed with this for­mat before, and liked how it was capa­ble of show­ing sev­er­al styles in one piece. I guess this end­ed up as kind of the same for­mat grid as those Art Vs. Artist images, and I could’ve done a new one of those, but I decid­ed I want­ed to do this instead.

For those who have a bit of inter­est in process info like I do, this start­ed off as pen­ciled, inked and let­tered on paper, then it was scanned and processed fur­ther in Photoshop.

There real­ly isn’t much more to say about it, except that I wish you all a Mer­ry Christ­mas, and Hap­py Hol­i­days! I hope 2022 is good to all of us.

To Boldly Go where No Tastebuds Have Gone Before!

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Recent­ly, cour­tesy of Net­flix, I’ve been re-watch­ing the orig­i­nal Star Trek. It’s not like I haven’t already watched all of these episodes mul­ti­ple times over the years, but they’re always enter­tain­ing (even the less­er ones have some­thing to rec­om­mend them). Yeah, I’ll admit it: I was a bit of Trekkie grow­ing up. I prob­a­bly built the Enter­prise mod­el three or four dif­fer­ent times (always hop­ing that maybe this time they’d fig­ured out a way to engi­neer it so the nacelles would­n’t sag out­wards). I even did my own lit­tle home­made 8mm Star Trek movie when i was in ele­men­tary school (but that’s anoth­er story).

Watch­ing the episode “The Cor­bomite Maneu­ver” again for the umpteenth time, I got struck by this sil­ly idea for a retro-styled ad. It was one of those things that gets stuck in your head, and you feel like you have to do it in order to get it unstuck. So here it is! If you’re as famil­iar with the show as I am, you’ll get it.

Though my his­to­ry with Illus­tra­tor goes back quite a ways (Illus­tra­tor 88, any­one?), I tried a tech­nique I haven’t done before on this. I’m used to Illus­tra­tor always look­ing pris­tine clean, so get­ting more of a tex­tured look was some­thing dif­fer­ent. I’d guess in the pre-dig­i­tal art era when peo­ple did illus­tra­tions like this, it was like­ly done using an air­brush set so it would spray in a more tex­tur­al way. Or maybe it was done by paint­ing with a sponge and frisket material.

It occurs to me this also kind of works pret­ty well as a year-end piece! I wish all my site vis­i­tors the best, and may 2021 be a much bet­ter year for us all!

Jeff Bonivert’s Atomic Man

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Atomic-Man“And now, for some­thing com­plete­ly different!”

I’m dig­ging deep for this one. The ’80s saw a lot of inter­est­ing, fun, odd, inde­pen­dent comics. Jeff Bonivert’s Atom­ic Man Comics was one of them.

I don’t remem­ber just how I first encoun­tered Jeff Bonivert’s work, but it most def­i­nite­ly caught my eye. It’s unique for the abstract geo­met­ric and graph­ic way he approach­es his draw­ings. I pick up a bit of an art deco or stream­lined feel to it in places. There’s no mis­tak­ing his work for any­one else’s.

I believe that like me, Jeff is from the Bay Area. There was a time in the ’80s when we even worked at the same place, but unfor­tu­nate­ly I nev­er got to meet him and talk comics (it was a pret­ty big place).

I some­how man­aged to get all three issues of Jef­f’s Atom­ic Man Comics back when they came out, and there’s a def­i­nite sense of fun to the pro­ceed­ings. Atom­ic Man is real­ly kind of a clas­sic-style comics hero. He has super-strength and invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, but does­n’t appear to have any oth­er super­pow­ers beyond that. Jeff added some fresh ideas to the mix, in that Atom­ic Man is hap­pi­ly mar­ried, with two kids, liv­ing in San Fran­cis­co. Being from the Bay Area, that last part sort of mat­tered to me, because it seems like the tra­di­tion­al default for most super­heroes has been to base them in NYC (or some fic­ti­tious NYC surrogate).

For my Atom­ic Man salute, I thought a styl­is­tic exper­i­ment using Adobe Illus­tra­tor might be a good way of attempt­ing some­thing that could evoke the look of Jeff Bonivert’s work.

Atom­ic Man is ™ and © 2014 Jeff Bonivert.

Heads Up!

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Heads 1A sug­ges­tion was made to me recent­ly that it would be good if I were to do some kind of a post here that dis­played a num­ber of dif­fer­ent styles togeth­er, all at once. So this is what I came up with: a series of head shots, of dif­fer­ent types of char­ac­ters in dif­fer­ent styles.

It’s a pret­ty good exer­cise for an artist, I found. It makes you stretch a lit­tle bit, and it can be fun to see what you come up with. I think I may try this again at some point. Or maybe even a vari­a­tion on the theme: one char­ac­ter, dif­fer­ent styles. There’s a whole lot you can do with this idea.

Qui est Cette Fille?

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BandetteI’m con­tin­u­ing with the theme from last time, talk­ing about good comics I’ve read recent­ly. The rea­son this post’s title is in French will become clear in a bit.

This time out, it’s Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover’s Ban­dette. From the moment I first saw art from this com­ic, I knew it would be right up my alley. But it’s only recent­ly that I was able to buy a copy. This is because up until now, Ban­dette did­n’t exist in phys­i­cal form. It was part of the Mon­key­brain line of dig­i­tal comics.

Here’s where I might sound like a bit of an old fogey, but I haven’t quite been able to cross over yet to pur­chas­ing comics that exist sole­ly in dig­i­tal form. I’m not anti-dig­i­tal media by any means! I love check­ing out my favorite web comics, and I love the fact that if I devel­oped a sud­den ran­dom crav­ing to buy mari­achi music at 2 am, I could pur­chase it instant­ly on iTunes. But even so, I can’t quite get past feel­ing a lit­tle odd over the fact there’s noth­ing phys­i­cal to show for those pur­chas­es. Feels a bit like buy­ing air, even though I know it’s not the case.

Any­how, in this case, I knew that as soon as Ban­dette became avail­able in phys­i­cal form, I’d want to pick up a copy. And I was not dis­ap­point­ed! Ban­dette Vol­ume One: Presto! is an absolute blast.

Her adven­tures take place in Paris (hence my post title). You might think from the visu­al that Ban­dette would be a super­heroine, but no! Actu­al­ly, she’s a thief! Albeit an incred­i­bly gift­ed one, (with “Presto!”, as she’d say) who occa­sion­al­ly comes to the aid of Police Inspec­tor Belgique.

Ban­dette is adorable, irre­press­ible, with je ne sais quoi and joie de vivre (and per­haps oth­er French phras­es that go beyond the extent of my lim­it­ed recall of my high school and col­lege French). You can’t help but like her! Some of it is due to the writ­ing (Paul Tobin dis­plays a tal­ent for giv­ing the dia­logue a French-feel­ing rhythm with­out resort­ing to pho­net­ic accents). A lot of it also comes from Colleen Coover’s art, which imbues Ban­dette with so much life and appeal, and spontaneity.

I’d think most read­ers junior high age and up (or old­er read­ers who are still some­what young at heart) will love this book. My only regret is that there isn’t a Vol­ume 2 ready to read right now! I’d def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend check­ing Ban­dette out, if you get the chance.

Before I close, it seems appro­pri­ate (giv­en my tim­ing, and the top­ic) to wish all my site vis­i­tors a joyeux noel et bonne année!

Ban­dette is ™ and © Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover.

“…Suddenly a White Rabbit…”

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Marvel Team-Up #131 ReworkedYou’re see­ing a rein­ter­pre­ta­tion here of the cov­er to Mar­vel Team-Up #131. I must con­fess that I know absolute­ly noth­ing about the White Rab­bit, or how much of a con­nec­tion she has to the char­ac­ter that appeared in the Lewis Car­roll book Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land. I don’t have a clue about Frog-Man either. I’ve nev­er read this comic.

So why did I do this cov­er? Sim­ple: when I saw the orig­i­nal, I thought there was some­thing fun here that could be rein­ter­pret­ed. If you look around my site, you’ll see that I do things like this on occa­sion. I even got to do it once for the late, lament­ed Cov­ered Blog before they called it a day. Though they’re no longer doing cov­er rein­ter­pre­ta­tions there, I think the idea is still worth pur­su­ing from time to time here.

While more or less straight recre­ations can be fun too, tak­ing an orig­i­nal cov­er and try­ing to find a fresh angle or spin to put on it can be even more fun. In this case, I thought ren­der­ing it in a dif­fer­ent style to make the humor­ous intent of the sto­ry more obvi­ous would be a fun thing to do. And it seemed appro­pri­ate to use the Mar­vel Pop Art Pro­duc­tions cor­ner box with it.

For once, that’s pret­ty much all there is to say for this one!

The Mighty…Motor Scooter??

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Thor on Pink ScooterNot long ago, I received an email from my friend and men­tor, Lar­ry Hous­ton. He’d stum­bled across the exis­tence of this toy motor scoot­er from the ’60s that had a fig­ure of Thor rid­ing it. Marx Toys had appar­ent­ly licensed the rights from Mar­vel Comics to man­u­fac­ture and sell these.

Oh, and I should­n’t for­get to men­tion that they made the motor scoot­er pink. Why Thor would even need to be tool­ing around on a motor scoot­er in the first place is one ques­tion. But why some­one at the toy com­pa­ny made the con­scious deci­sion that Thor’s scoot­er ought to be pink is one of those big ques­tions in life that I just don’t think we’ll ever have an answer to.

I had been aware of the exis­tence of this toy pre­vi­ous­ly, but had kind of for­got­ten about it until Lar­ry’s email remind­ed me. In response, I was able to show him evi­dence that not only had they done this with Thor, they’d sold toys of Cap­tain Amer­i­ca and Spi­der-Man on motor scoot­ers too. Spi­der-Man’s was also pink, but for some rea­son they allowed Cap to have a yel­low scoot­er. You can see all three toys here, if you’re curious.

Any­way, the men­tal image of Mar­vel’s god of thun­der on a pink motor scoot­er stuck with me. Some­times these things just have to come out, so there you go! Per­haps this could even start an inter­net meme, of peo­ple draw­ing Mar­vel super­heroes on pink motor scoot­ers! I mean, why not?