Undertaker T-shirt

I usually don't post freelance stuff here, because the whole point of the blog is to force myself to do extracurricular work, but I happen to be overly proud of this piece I did for WWE.

I don't usually get hired to do finished illustrations, so it was terribly exciting to really open up and see what I could do. As much of a milestone as this was for me, I had to sit on the art for six months when the Undertaker was temporarily out of action. The shirt very nearly got shelved altogether, and it was well within the realm of the non-disclosure I signed. (Something about sitting in an HR office under a poster of a screaming, blood-soaked Cena makes you sign those standard legal documents with a little more solemnity.)

Anyway, The Undertaker made his heavily-hyped return to Monday Night Raw this week, and lo and behold there's the shirt for sale on WWE's website. I might have to order one for every day of the week.

2/6/11

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.

Ron & Fez: Trapped on a bus

I finally sent a cartoon to the Ron & Fez show on Sirius that got talked about on the air. They also tweeted to their fans, jokingly referring to it as a "political cartoon". Of course I managed to miss hearing them talking about it, and also forgot to sign the drawing.

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "On the Winning of a Wild Bed"

My latest cover for Sleeves' subscription-only CD series. I'm pleased that the final art is pretty close to what I saw in my head while listening to the story--that almost never happens. I wanted to try something with a whimsical storybook vibe, like Ezra Jack Keats with the added decorative element of the little fairytale images on the bedcover. I'm disappointed I couldn't figure out a way to identify Sherwin with his iconic hat, but it seemed it would make the image too cluttered.



















Just for fun, here's some initial thumbnails I did. I kept trying to come up with an alternate composition, because I thought I wouldn't be able to pull off the one I had in mind. I thought my idea for the bedcover pattern was hopelessly ambitious.






















My rough sketches for the characters on the bedcover...
























...and the final vector art rendering. I could have just sketched these out in photoshop, but I thought they needed the crisp lines that you get with Adobe Illustrator to distinguish them from the main drawing. There's a knight, a dragon, a castle, a princess locked in a tower; then from C.S. Lewis a faun, a lamppost and the White Witch; and it seemed apropos that Alice's rabbit make an appearance. After all my worrying that I would botch this, I knocked out the actual art in an hour or so.

Daniel Craig

Huzzah! Sam Mendes Officially Directing Daniel Craig in 'Bond 23' for 2012.

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "The Dinner in the Dark"

An illustration inspired by another of Sleeves' stories, "The Dinner in the Dark". (Full episode list here.)

Richard Kuklinski

I just got done reading "The Ice Man", Philip Carlo's amazing biography of one of the more notorious monsters the Western world produced in the last century. I want to mention here that I have never owned a Charles Manson t-shirt, or a painting by John Wayne Gacy, or ever even watched "Dexter". Serial killers are not my thing, but Carlo's book is quite fascinating.

Richard Kuklinski was the top porn distributor (legal and otherwise) in New York in the 70's, and that was his veneer of respectability. His real job was a contract killer for the Mafia. And even that amounted to passing in straight society, because he was also a voracious serial killer who maybe killed as many people for his own reasons as he did for pay, and that's no small number. He wasn't the skulking, pervy kind of serial killer, he was a loyal (though abusive) family man who quietly went out looking to get into street fights so he could take guys out face to face. He was a huge guy, gifted with near-superhuman strength (if his wife needed a refrigerator moved, he'd just pick it up), a catlike ability to stalk quietly, and what can only be described as a predator's sixth sense for danger that kept him alive and out of trouble with the law over a thirty-year career. The guy could have been friggin' Batman had he been so inclined, but as it happened his upbringing left him a straight psychopath.

What's truly amazing about Carlo's book is that he so methodically lays the building blocks of Kuklinski's psyche that you almost start feeling like you understand why he took the path he did.

Presenting the Robot Monster Hoodie!

Bunche put up a facebook profile pic wearing a jacket that he had brilliantly retrofitted from the top half of a gorilla suit that had outlived its usefulness. Since I'm pretty sure that usefulness at least partially consisted of being part of a Halloween costume of the 1950's Z-grade sci-fi flick "Robot Monster", it struck me as a good idea to go all the way with it.

Here's Steve in his gorilla jacket...























...and his original "Robot Monster" costume in all its glory, from our Marvel Bullpen days.
























UPDATE: HUZZAH! I FINALLY MADE io9!

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "The Three Benches"

Cover art for the first limited-edition CD of my favorite podcast.

St. Nick Redux

A re-draw of something I put up last year, based on Marcus McLauren's brilliant observation that the St. Nick of "Night Before Christmas" is in fact, "a dirty tiny elf". I'd hoped to have the whole poem ready as a book for download, but I didn't get to it. Maybe next year!