[ s p o o k y _ b a s e m e n t ] double dose

...June 13, 2020, huh? i suppose it's been a while.

life has proceeded apace. proper exploration another time, but for now suffice it to say that (1) the Damoclean Chairship, (2) an unexpected move at the height of Housing Madness ^TM, (3) a new and similarly unanticipated lec+lab prep, and (4) my venerable old laptop hard-bricking have rather slowed things down. there was work! i present evidence:

my brother completed the third and final panel of the absurdist "Spooky Basement" tryptich, which is our shout into the void of this rapidly falling-apart world. i am immensely proud of him. it was a fun challenge and i'm pretty happy with how it turned out, although we'll probably never finish the original plan for the back cover with some additional mockup pixel art.

dense action on this one, from the overt NES Black Box theme to thematic refs re: Abadox and other childhood staples. i'm mostly happy with the palette and organic/mech opposition... and i mean, i got to draw a planet with a butt. a delight! the Spooky Basement operation is closing up shop this year; I'll let the man himself explain why.

COVID hosed an awful lot, but one of the greatest stings is that I didn't get that chance to share the SB booth at a horror con to sell some of my own prints (which would also critically have, uh, required me to draw more. see above.). i wish that it could have been otherwise, but Dr Pangloss was an idiot and we live far away indeed from the best of all worlds.

so, a year ago Christmas, seeing that the truly brilliant SB enterprise was winding down, i made the following as Kid Bro's present: a remixed and enhanced ("Ultra Director's HD Remaster S-Rank Golden Bonanza F NFTs") remix of the SB1 cover art. fourteen months later, this is the last thing i've had time to do. i really like this piece, and am glad that it's been my quicksave point for now.

hey, maybe with this new [read: unexpected/mandatory purchase] rig, i can get off my butt and do something again.

let us see where this goes.

/.n [while listening to Haircuts for Men]

[ t h e _ r e d _ d e a t h ]

so. many things have changed.

what better time than the darkest year of our lord 2020 to celebrate my favorite Poe story, "The Masque of the Red Death"? this crisp tale of an arrogant, cocooned aristocracy reveling while the world burns surely has zero import today.

while this has been a deeply, wearying-to-the-bone HALF YEAR thus far, let's skirt the current state of affairs and instead talk about blood-drenched gods of pestilence descending upon the callous and decadent. you know, more hopeful fare. i've loved this story since i was a child*+**, due in large part to the primacy, front and f'ing center, of its garish and evocative color palette. i've spoken on this before, and it's obvious everywhere in my non-narrative work, but i live for what RuPaul might call "Technicolor fantasy." [happy Pride, btw.] it's probably rooted in a bedrock-foundation visit to Disneyland at just the right age, further manifesting in a positive feedback loop with garish old American International and Hammer horror films. i adore the audacity of Prospero's vision of the series of imperial suites in their wild hues, lit by braziers through stained windows. it flickers behind my eyes.

so this one was a challenge that came at the right time. i feel like the prints in this series to date - Beetlejuice, Event Horizon, and The Gate - have been hit or miss in terms of what i visualized and wanted to achieve. The Red Death benefitted from a fundamental change in my COVID-era mindset, in which i'm far more comfortable with trashing hours of work that didn't line up quite right. this one is pretty close to what i see in my head when i read the story.

so let's talk art. i find it legit interesting that the series of colors in the chambers sounds super cool on the page... but the adjacent color combinations actually look awful when presented to human eyes. i really should have seen this coming. i had so many ideas about dramatic layouts for this print that would better incorporate the spectrum of the suites, but... no. god, no. it took a hideously long time just to settle on the minimalist framing kludge, which i think actually worked out reasonably well. i certainly have a newfound understanding for the artistic license that Corman et al. took in swapping out several of the colors in their weird and delightful 1964 Vincent Price adaptation. as written, that dog just don't hunt.

obviously all of the horror cons are cancelled this year, and in part this piece is me mentally preparing for a pandemic-exiled Halloween. [my guts are roiling as i type this.] i'm working out kinks in getting high-quality physical prints of this new series, and repurposing some old artwork from the Rossi collab era, but i guess i've got some time. someday. someday i will have a little booth to peddle fragments of my haunted brain. i will meet beautifully strange kindred spirits and all will be right with the world.

you have to believe in something.

in closing, i should have called this "Illimitable Dominion," but f it. the Red Death doesn't need to impress anyone.

/.n [while listening to old-timey Marilyn Manson, "Antichrist Superstar." it's like comfort food. aaaand, i just realized it turns 25 next year... O.O] [update, 2022: welll, throw this boy on the pile with Michael Jackson. :( :( :(]

*fun aside: when we were small children, my brother and i gorged on every book of horror, fictional and otherwise, we could get our hands on at the library. like, age-way-inappropriate stuff. my grandmother expressed concern to our mom that, "those boys are going to grow up perverted." i mean, she wasn't wrong!

**uh, so apparently i told that story last time! i guess i really miss my grandma. :( she checked out at the right time, 2020 would not be for her.

[ d o n ' t _ o p e n _ g e o d e s ]

The Gate? show of hands?

hmm. you're missing out.

ok, so Tibor Takács' 1987 horror film for kids holds up surprisingly well, with some truly brilliant forced perspective shots, Ray Harryhausen-inspired creature design, and a Lovecraftian mythos conveyed through the exposition of a deceased metal band's album. Sacrifyx f'ing RULES! *horns*

my brother and i were hooked on this one early in life, and for my money it's an underappreciated masterpiece. this print adapts one of my favorite scenes after the false ending, when all hell literally breaks loose and large sigils of blood appear as these little minions (predating the current, culturally repellent connotations of the phrase) celebrate the advent of their outer god "The Dark Master." MAN, i love the overt hokiness of this thing.

while there may be some market appeal to a Certain Kind of Someone with this and particularly the Beetlejuice print, you can see that i'm just drawing (and drawing from) whatever the hell is important to me from often obscure parts of why, in my grandmother's accurate and ominous prediction, my brother and i were going to "grow up perverted." i mean, she was right. may as well have fun with it.

i missed the call for booths at our local horror con in September, which has switched venues and somehow sold out of spots in two days (?!). i'm on the waitlist but depending on financial circumstances and whether or not i can keep drawing while school is going, i may roll the dice and piggyback on a Spooky Basement Jersey booth first. the newest chapter - IN SPACE - is in the works, and i need to try to get the cover done this month.

oh boy.

/.n [while listening to "Toss A Coin To Your Witcher," because I watched The Gate four times this week]

PS. BY THE WAY!

follow me on insta @iceandshadows.

[ g r a v i t y _ d r i v e ]

i mentioned "completely different," right?

my chops couldn't pull off my original vision for this concept, but thematically it rhymes. someday i'll revisit this idea with something closer to what i'd intended, but i do like the ultimate simplicity of design in what this became. i tried adding to or tweaking it for days on end and kept reverting back to a cleaner, more elemental look. the meat grinder tunnel is reinterpreted as something more organic and menacing ("Who knows where this ship has been... and what it's brought back with it."), and the iconic rings and knobs of the gravity drive are lovingly reproduced.

this one is for those who know. damn, i love this movie. my brother and i somehow coerced our "beyond unimpressed by horror and tawdry content" dad to take us to this one in the theater, and OH BOY he did not have a fun time. love you, Pops.

/.n [while listening to the Event Horizon score]

[ t h e _ w e d d i n g _ c l o t h e s ]

time for something new.

i've been feeling defeated a lot lately. i feel like i'm hitting a plateau at work and am concerned about the direction of my school; large chunks of society are wholesale abandoning decency, reason, and accountability; and lots of things i'd looked forward to are falling short or just can't happen. i don't know if i've been having more depressive states than usual this past year or if i'm just getting better at noticing them. nuts to it - let's try to explore new adventures.

one thing i've wanted to try for a while is to run a little booth at a horror con and sell art prints. i'm damn sure i'm going to take a loss on it, but i just want to have that experience (and bonus if i can hustle at a con with my bro). i may be able to repurpose some of my older stuff, but in general that's going to challenge me to come up with a new line of prints. normally i'm a bit slow to come up with novel ideas, but when i started thinking about movies or stories that are personally important to me, a bunch sprang more or less fully formed in my mind. i'm going to botch the ever-loving hell out of them helping them escape into the world with my, er, "developing" skill set, but it's been an interesting, fun, and frustrating process so far. here's the first: "The Wedding Clothes."

a reimagined exorcism scene from Beetlejuice - perhaps in the future - with the wedding garb of Not The Maitlands. this movie is probably tied with Ghostbusters for my favorite comedy, spookily themed or otherwise, of all time. to paraphrase the man, "I've seen [Beetlejuice] about a hundred sixty-seven times... and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it!"

pour one out for Otho. happy belated Halloween.

/.n [while listening to the main theme from Beetlejuice]

[ t h e _ p r i s o n e r ]

as promised. Happy Walpurgisnacht.

there's a lot to say about this one. a vibrant print of it was my first public art exhibition in meatspace (other than that time i won an ASPCA contest back in 6th grade. i drew a dolphin...). "The Prisoner" hung at my school's Morrissey Art Gallery in March and April as part of a portfolio exchange, and i was incredibly pumped that some of the art students really dug it. the colors, the colors!

we recorded a podcast about the general exhibition; you can hear my talky talky (mins. 4-11, 36) about Weird Fiction, Bloodborne and Gothic Revival architecture, Italian horror cinema, riding in Jim Lee's Porsche, and other fun bullshit. this may be the only instance in which i don't primally, elementally loathe how i come across in an interview, so please consider checking it out.

the blurb below is similar to text intended to accompany my print on the wall, but a little more personal and without unnecessary biographical info. its counterpart in reality was (surprise!) banished to a binder in the corner that no one realized existed, and i think it gives some important context here.

whatever. i've installed it as a permanent click-through to the actual story.

thanks for sticking with me.

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I create small horror stories.

Most of my [sparse] work over the past decade has explored my interest in early Weird Fiction, with themes inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, and others. “The Prisoner” is heavily influenced by a more recent entry in the genre, Bloodborne (FromSoftware, Sony Computer Entertainment, 2015), which I consider to be the richest and most successful interpretation of cosmic horror in an interactive medium to date. Its breathtaking Gothic art direction and themes of addiction, fatalism, and the doomed pursuit of the unknowable inspired me to write this story.

As in my other recent tales, “The Prisoner” focuses on the frailty and failings of an individual against a backdrop of Very Big Things happening. I suspect that many of us have, at some point in life, been able to relate to a feeling of powerlessness in the face of addiction or similar cycles of self-destruction. It can be hard, so hard, to find the sense of agency one needs to break free from a struggle with alcohol, a toxic relationship, or in the case of “The Prisoner,” communing with eldritch gods through the vessel of a blood witch.

There is hope.

This story is, as always, dedicated to my amazing wife, partner, and patron Jillian. Thank you for believing in me.

“The Prisoner” was printed at 14x18” and displayed at one of my university’s art galleries from March 8 - April 12, 2019 as a contribution to the Moving Pictures Portfolio Exchange. Certain elements of the design would be lost were I to cut the page into strips to better fit a computer monitor, so please pan around the image as necessary.

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/.n [while, neatly bookending this chapter from Halloween, listening to the Bloodborne soundtrack.]