Baby Face!

I love Harvey comics especially Hot Stuff the Little Devil and Spooky (Casper's tough cousin...he's the ghost what wears a 'doiby'). Those cute little characters were on my mind as I was working on this drawing...which is why it a)Looks kinda like a comic book cover and 2) has that silly little clown above the price. I figured I couldn't and shouldn't just draw the Harvey clown which was on the covers of Spooky and Hot Stuff so I created this little guy. He's got a hobo beard and hat which started as a derby and ended up more like a sombrero with a pom-pom.

Noah is about 8 months old by now and is the son of a friend visiting from New Zealand. She'd asked me to draw a picture of him. Which I would have done anyway because he's a funny little guy with a giant head of hair. But I was torn...did Noah's mom want a portrait (traditional shading on textured paper)?

I don't really do "portrait" art so I figured comic book inking was the way to go. I think she liked it.

j.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon!

The Creature from the Black Lagoon is my favourite of the Universal Horror Monsters! The monster looks great! There's a terrific scene where Julie Adams is swimming and the creature is beneath her also swimming in an almost mirror image of her (if the mirror in question was a distorting mirror that turned you into an underwater creature of the opposite sex).

The movie was originally made to play in 3-D which is why the second image has that sort of off centre red behind the black out line. Watching an old 3-D movies without the glasses actually hurts the muscles of my eyes and makes me want to almost throw up. Please don't throw up when you look at my drawing of the Creature from the Black Lagoon!!

There are two sequels to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Revenge of the Creature stars John Agar who was married to Shirley Temple for a while. There is also a lab scene with a young Clint Eastwood as a lab technician (Eastwood also appears in another movie by Creature director Jack Arnold...The Tarantula. Clint is the pilot at the very end of the film who blows up the mutant arachnid).

The Creature Walks Among Us isn't my favourite of the Creature movies but it does have some stuff I like. Scientists decide to operate on the Creature to make him more human which is one of my favourite sci-fi plots (I think it's sometimes called Pinnocchio syndrome...a conceit of man's that everyone and everything wants to be just like him). There's a real heartbreaking ending to the Creature Walks Among Us because of the arrogant scientific manipulation. And there's a well done plot about an abusive relationship between a married couple.

Check those movies out if you haven't already seen them.

j.

p.s. Ben Chapman, who was in the Creature costume for land sequences in the first film, was at a Comic book and Sci-Fi/Horror convention here in town recently. I watched him signing some stuff but didn't meet him. I didn't really know what to say to him.