I am Providence

I saw an interesting documentary about H.P. Lovecraft last week, so I thought I'd do something quick in a Cthulhian vein for Halloween this year:

My exposure to Lovecraft has mostly been through radio dramas adapted from his works rather than the original stories themselves and I didn't really know much about Lovecraft himself. He was a strange but interesting guy, which is what you'd expect from someone who specialized in stories of unspeakable tentacled horrors that lie dormant within the Earth.

His family tree went back to the founding families of Providence, RI where he lived all but a few years of his life. "I am Providence" is the epitaph on his tombstone, and R'Lyeh is the lost city built by his race of ancient space monsters, so that's where the epigram comes from.

Happy belated Halloween!

El Borak

I just started reading a collection of some of Robert E.Howard's lesser known adventure stories, El Borak and Other Desert Adventure Tales. El Borak is the name the locals gave to the hero of the majority of the stories, Francis Xavier Gordon, a Texas gunslinger who finds himself in the wilds of Afghanistan.

So far, the stories are very good. I had always avoided Howard's 'lesser' works, assuming they weren't as good as the Conan or Solomon Kane stories, but his writing is actually very consistent in quality. I think a lot of his creations fell by the wayside since they were based on standard pulp tropes (explorers, sailors, boxers, cowboys, etc.) that are considered dated by today's standards, and not because they were poorly written.

More Chicken Scratch

Another page of lunchtime doodles:

Out with the Old, In with the New

The company I work for was recently bought by Disney and today is officially our first day under the Mouse. I would imagine that we'll have to say goodbye to some of our old characters that aren't quite family friendly, like Stubbs the Zombie:


I guess that just means that we'll have to come up with something even better.

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?

Only The Shadow knows! (insert Orson Welles laughter here)

Messing around with markers & white Prismacolor pencil on textured grey paper:

Jack London in Paradise

I take the train to work everyday and I use that time to make up for years of not reading by plowing through as many books as I can.

Right now, I'm reading "Jack London in Paradise" by Paul Malmont. His first book, "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril", is one of my favorites. He seems to enjoy taking his favorite writers and dropping them into the types of stories that they wrote. I'm sure it's been done before, but I really enjoy his approach to it.

I never knew much about Jack London before starting this book, so I've been reading a bit about him and looking at old photos online. I gave myself 15 minutes to knock out a sketch of him and another 15 minutes to 'antique' it a bit:

Pulp in Progress

I'm slowly chipping away at inking the group sketch of pulp characters I posted a few days ago so I thought I'd post a little work in progress detail of the Spider, the Shadow and most of Doc Savage's widow's peak. I know that Doc wasn't portrayed that way until James Bama started painting the covers to the reprints in the 60's, but that's the way he'll always look to me:

I Love a Mystery

I get tired of listening to music while I work, so I've started listening to some of the old time radio shows. The internet archive has a huge collection, but some of the files are in such bad shape they aren't worth listening to. Fortunately, there is an OTR fanatic who runs a site called Broken Sea Audio and one of the things he does is restore old shows so that they can be enjoyed again.

Lately, I've been listening to a show called 'I Love a Mystery' which is more of an adventure show than a mystery show done in a very pulpy style. The serials have great titles like 'Temple of Vampires' and 'Pirate Loot of the Island of Skulls'. The thing I realize as I listen to these shows is that maybe radio dramas were the ideal format for pulp stories. I've tried reading some of the old books and while I love the concepts, I can't get into the writing. Same goes for the movies, even the modern ones like Sky Captain - nice visuals, but not quite right (though The Rocketeer was great, as was the Rocketeer comic book). These radio shows somehow hit the marks that the books and movies miss. I suppose it has something to do with the concept of the 'Theater of the Mind' as they used to say in the golden age of radio.

Anyway, I was inspired to make a fake vintage newspaper ad for the show:


One interesting thing about these old shows is the advertising. This show was sponsored by Fleischmann's yeast which wasn't being advertised as a baking ingredient, but as a health food. You either mixed it into tomato juice to make a 'vitamin cocktail' or just ate it straight - blech!

Backlog

After putting in a lot of hours to finish a big project at work, then taking a short but much needed vacation, and finally slogging through the inevitable post-vacation slump I'm getting back to being productive again.

I spent most of last weekend cleaning my home studio and in the process found a pile of old, half finished artwork. Since they're all pretty far along and won't require any major effort, I'm going to try to finish them up and hopefully build up momentum towards some of the other, bigger efforts I'm trying to get off the ground.

Up first is a sketch I drew when I was reading a lot about the history of the pulps - just a goofy group shot of some of the major and minor characters of the era:


I'm going to clean it up, ink it and probably color it too. I'll post the steps as I go. I also need to go back and figure out who all the characters are - there are some pretty obscure ones in there.

Only The Shadow Knows

Just a quick Shadow marker sketch today:

Zeppelin Fight

I've had a very hectic couple of weeks, so I haven't done a lot of work on the Lord Bastard project. That's not to say that I haven't been thinking about it a lot - I'm finally to a point with the story and characters where I can see things playing out like a movie in my mind. The characters are coming to life and the whole thing is starting to have its own 'feel'. On paper, I'm behind where I want to be with the project, but I feel good about where it's going.

I took some time last night to loosely concept an idea for a scene I've been kicking around:



One of my most cherished possessions is an old copy of Prevue magazine from the late 70's that had a big pull out poster of concept art that Jim Steranko did for Raiders of the Lost Ark. I love the rugged feeling he gave the paintings and the warm tones he used to give the desert a romantic, pulpy feel. This is my lame attempt at capturing that same feeling.

Solomon Kane & Candy Canes

Let me try this one more time - the first time I posted these, the images weren't clickable.

Anyway, I finally got some time to finish the last page of the Solomon Kane story I had intended to wrap up by Halloween. I didn't get the last page done in time, then things conpsired to keep my from finishing it, and suddenly it's almost Christmas.

Here's the whole story:

Shipwrecked Page Five

Got a little behind this week, so I missed my Halloween deadline, but only one more page to go:

Shipwrecked Page Four

Shipwrecked Page Three

Shipwrecked Page Two

Shipwrecked Page One

Here we go:

Halloween Project

I started this blog last year right around Halloween and my first posts were all monsters of some sort. Since I'm holding back on posting anything related to the graphic novel I'm trying to get going I haven't had a lot to post, but I wanted to do something special for Halloween. I've had an idea for a short Solomon Kane story in my head for a while, so I thought I'd do something with that. Here's the first panel:


For the sake of trying something new, I'm doing the whole thing digitally and I'm messing around with making custom brushes to achieve some of the pen & ink techniques of the old E.C. horror comics.

My goal is to have the whole thing done by Halloween - we'll see how that goes.

Operator 5

I've been reading a book about the history of the pulp novels - it's got chapters on all of the usual characters, like The Shadow and Doc Savage, but it also talks about some of the forgotten heroes. Most of them are forgotten because they were either cheap knock-offs or just plain schlock, but a few sounded pretty interesting, like Operator 5.

The premise of the stories is that an invading army rolls through the US in the early 30's and locks the country down under martial rule. The military is destroyed, the government is dissolved (the president shoots himself), and the only hope for salvation is a small band of freedom fighters led by Operator 5, the last remaining government agent.

Like a lot of the pulps, these stories were a weird mish-mash of current events, future speculation and crazy sci-fi which lead to some very strange ideas and imagery. Operator 5, the wholesome hero, wore the death's head skull as his symbol (pre-dating the SS), blew up buildings and bridges and regularly used his girlfriend as bait for enemy. I guess they didn't call it hard boiled action for nothing:

Recharging the Batteries

I haven't been doing much drawing for fun lately, so I looked around online for some sketch challenges to try. James Gurney, of Dinotopia fame, posts a random phrase from old sci-fi books every week on his blog as an exercise for his readers to illustrate. This week's quote was, "the old man felt a tendril of anger rising." My quick take on it:

The sketches don't have to be drawn in any sort of genre style, but I'm a sucker for old pulpy sci-fi.