[ 2 0 2 3 - 2 0 2 4 ] content dump

well. i haven't gotten any more prompt at this.

life is strange. a couple years later, i find myself an Associate Dean during a university merger/acquisition, which is... not a direction i thought i'd take. i'm definitely not bored, and quoth an original and spot-on aphorism from my mom, "life is weird, but sometimes it's ok."

so last time (er, nearly three years ago), we'd wrapped on Spooky Basement. my brother and i needed a new project to work on, and he and his delightful partner developed a truly clever idea. kid bro is a truly accomplished horticulturist, which has served him well as a creative and stress outlet over recent years. here's the pitch: develop a line of plants, in Halloween containers (and some even in custom Boglins-style cardboard cages!), to be sold at conventions. The extra kick is that each plant variety has a "creature card," as though they're RPG-style monsters; think Akira Toriyama's (RIP RIP) Dragon Quest lineup. And thus, Creatures from the Plant Lagoon was born.

we ended up doing two series: an initial run of ten monsters, and a Series Two of seven more. Go check out the Instagram page for con photos and such, but they were wildly successful at their inaugural horror con. the subsequent "generic" comic con, less so. as is known, horror fans are legit.

here's a photo of some of the offerings, although you'll want to check out the Insta for the full booth, boxes, and effect.

i won't dump all 17 critters below, but i patched together sampler boards of a few of my favorites for the website. as always, click to enlarge.

so! that occupied a couple of fun weeks in the summer/fall of '23 and early '24. otherwise, not much to report on the art front. i nabbed a very choice Wacom Movink tablet in mid-'24, but to date have only had time to use it for my brother's bd present. as you may know, we grew up in the H and frequented Six Flags Astroworld (also RIP RIP) with a grimy intensity. Fright Fest was something special, and featured the horrifying (to our wiener baby selves) mascot Pumpkin Head. urban legends sprang forth like wizened tendrils from his shadowy tread. my brother was featured on the 2022 Halloween episode of the Forever Bogus podcast and told one of these tales to the hosts' delight.

it only felt right to capture it on a t-shirt for his bd.

until then.

/.n [while listening to Haircuts for Men. at least some things don't change.]

[ 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.

=====

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.

=====

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

[ s p o o k y _ b a s e m e n t ] - Freak Show banner

i've been on sabbatical this semester; while it's come with ups and downs, the first couple of months provided a surfeit of free time to engage in fabulous nonsense like this:

kid bro is back on the con circuit to promote Spooky Basement, with revised editions of the first two books out and a third novel [hopefully] on its way this summer. the target here was a vintage "Freak Show" aesthetic, featuring marquee creeps from each edition. Obese Chef Monster, Triclyde Momster [basically three of the Mob Wives rolled into one sentient trash heap], and the no-explanation-necessary Tent City of Perverts. you may recall references to the latter if you were one of three people to watch our livestream reading of SB2 on Christmas.

this was a ton of fun to do and i think turned out reasonably well. it's already made its debut in the wild at Monster Mania in Jersey. hopefully i will find a chance to hit another of these shows up before Clay retires.

you know we're not done for the day.

/.n [while sipping on the final 2018 Warlock and watching The Wicker Man (1973)]

Happy Halloween

enjoy this dark night.

i did in fact finish my story, "The Prisoner," in time for Halloween. but. BUT.

as mentioned in the previous post, this work is to be displayed in a gallery exhibition next March to April. i have decided to hold back publication until the end of the run to encourage people to come see the monster live in person. i am proud of this one. it is my darkest and most troubling story yet, sown deep with every bit of narrative and artistic structure i've cobbled together in my head over the years, and i hope that it works. i plan to publish it here on Walpurgisnacht as a compromise to the season.

here is one more panel for the road. i am sure that everything will be fine, just fine.

this was perhaps the most beautiful fall in memory. while the circumstances of adulting may have prevented me from fully immersing myself in the Halloween season, i will try to savor every last fading black wisp and i hope that it treats you well.

/.n [while again listening to the Bloodborne soundtrack. of course i am.]

[ s p o o k y _ b a s e m e n t _ 2 ] + upcoming stuff

it is known - my brother has an unusual mind. this has been noted by both family and strangers, child and adult, those keenly observant and those less so.

it is a good thing, and he has a new book out: Spooky Basement Vol. 2: The 13 Creeps of Christmas [print|kindle]. go, go now and do the right thing.

Vol. 2 continues the adventures of Baron and Garindax as they engage in glorious battle with existential dread and cursed/perverted/hipstery monsters in a haunted Christmas theme park while on an urgent quest to find the One True Santa. it's brilliant and disturbing and one of the funniest things i've ever read. Goosebumps for super-immature adults, indeed.

i spent the first chunk of summer knocking out the cover for this one, and i think it turned out rather fun. lots of perspective exercises this year.

Clay and his wife are currently hustling at Monster Mania 40 in Jersey, where i trust they'll continue to meet with tremendous success slinging these to Our People.

i am proud of my brother.

other news: next March and April i'm going to have a new work on public display (!) for the first time since i was a tiny child. i'm participating in a gallery showing in support of SAU's annual theme ("Visual Narratives"), and this gave me an excuse/challenge to tackle the Bloodborne-tinged story i mentioned back in January. it's a 14x18" single comic page with 11 panels, is about half done, and features i think some of my best and wildest stuff. if i get it done by Halloween, you'll see it in chopped-up, internet-ready form.

see you in October.

/.n [while listening to the Bloodborne soundtrack. Halloween is coming.]

[ t h e _ b o n e _ g a r d e n ] - postmortem

so this one took a while.

one night in early 2013, my then-fiancée J suffered a brutal and haunting nightmare that became the black seed crystal of "The Bone Garden." she described a lone Civil War soldier discovering an abandoned cabin on a hilltop, surrounded by a grove of bone-white trees that pressed closer and closer. they assimilate and corrupt anything they touch - that poor cardinal! - and the soldier eventually resigns himself to the grove.

we each continued developing the story in our own ways... her from the pure and bleak original, me from the diseased fancies it gave root in my head. she may get around to telling her version someday, and suffice it to say that we took very different paths. i want to read hers. i crave it.

the earliest files for the "Bone Garden" are time-stamped mid-April 2013. i worked on this thing feverishly throughout the summer of that year with the intent of producing a new work in the style and vein of "Deep of the Well," 2012's Halloween offering. the story flowed, if too verbosely at first. i'd wanted to write something echoing a classic Weird Tale for a long time, and one with an unreliable narrator checks so many of my boxes my leg starts thumping like a dog's.

the art was a different matter.

i finished the first ~2.5 pages in the style that i'd been pursuing since high school, first in pencil and then digitally, maxing out my skill and texture folders in a doomed attempt at what could charitably be called "stylized verisimilitude." whatever. it was killing me and it wasn't right.

i'd hit a wall. i was getting "better" at an asymptotically slower rate, but i didn't (and don't) have the chops to pull off what i'd wanted to do. i'd ended up constraining the art based on model photos i could find, the panels didn't work together, and most crucially / damningly, the style just didn't fit the story.

i showed J my work.

she hated it.

she was right. i shelved the whole damn thing.

memory is fuzzy about how i got back on track. there was a wedding, there was a house, there were dogs, there was eternal overload and calamity at work. somewhere between 2013 and summer of '16, i grew a pair and became comfortable with throwing away months of work to start again and do it right. it took another year and change, but i did it. love and credit to the inestimable Emily Carroll, probably the indy artist i most worship, for giving me inspiration in style, pacing, and beautiful brevity (you know i enjoy me some words). after J, this one is for her.

i intended to go into the second build with a "monochrome economy" approach; stylized and cartoony lines, heavy shading, simple colors. after over three years (at the time!), i wanted to get this thing done. i slipped from that back toward my old ways pretty darn quick, but refrained from using texture overlays and tried to rely on bold lines where i could. i think it worked in general, and i've had some nice feedback from various corners (including Art faculty!).

here are a few more cuts from the first run. alas.

there was a long break between pages six and seven, which i picked back up for the final sprint last summer. it shows... of all the art, p7 is just about the only one that doesn't fit the original concept in my head. i'm getting better at that, and it's exciting to be able to finally give you, my audience of between zero and ten-ish, a more direct line into my shadow-stricken psyche.

the greatest compliment was that J thought the cardinal scene was perfect, straight from her dream.

works for me.

the Next Big Thing is in the works; after playing through "Bloodborne," i feel a powerful urge to try my hand at a short allegory through cosmic horror. see you in thirty years.

/.na [while listening to Halfbreed, formally inaugurating the Halloween season]

#earnedhistory

This isn't an art post, but it's something important to me that I wrote in the wee hours last night. It's reprinted here so that it won't be instantly lost in the morass of my FB feed.

=====

I have a hard time getting invested in teams anymore.

The Astros are different.

My earliest memory of a pro sports event is when I was little kid in the mid-80s, clutching a Starting Lineup figure of Mike Scott after a game at the Astrodome. The little plastic pitcher is long gone, but I still have an even older Astros puppet (a dog… why a dog? why not??) in my dedicated 'stros cabinet. Nolan Ryan, Scott, Glenn Davis (whom I met many years later at the Trop). I think of my mom befriending Billy Hatcher’s wife at the park. Clay and me hassling the third base coach from the stands because his name was “Cubbage” and we thought it was fun to shout “CUB-BIIIIJJJJ!!!” at him for ten minutes at a stretch. Sneaking up to the closed upper deck, dodging security guards, and dancing in front of the Jumbotron during the last days of the ‘dome.

Watching the Astros close out a series for the ages tonight, I could imagine the excitement of the ‘stros fan in me going back, back to the beginning. From today’s cynical old man trying not to set myself up to be heartbroken, to that little kid marveling at the sheer audacity of a building like the Astrodome and its original animated scoreboard.

I remember watching live at one of my high school jobs while the friggin’ Braves put us out in the first round every. single. year. in the late ‘90s. The Killer B’s, from the now-Hall of Famers Big-gi-o and Baggy, whose autographs I treasure, to the half-forgotten ones like Derek Bell. My folks went to Biggio’s induction ceremony. I miss one-time heroes taken too soon… Cammy, Lima-time.

Sitting in every major section of MMP in its first season, from the Diamond boxes to so high in the nosebleeds I felt the burn from the lights. Walking the warning track. My family’s last night together in Houston was spent saying goodbye to my hometown with a ‘stros win at MMP.

The perforated-ulcer-stress of the ’05 postseason (tragically underrated) in my first semester of grad school. Driving down to Kissimmee for Spring Training solo or with a crew, and gaining a true brother and Astros devotee in Dr Dynamite. Watching my boys play in more cities than I can remember, from randomly meeting then-owner Drayton McLane (who called me Superman) on a cold and rainy night in DC, to fist-bumping Hunter Pence and crew. About half of the photos of me in grad school feature an Astros hat, which I didn’t quite realize until digging through old pictures while writing this post. I wore one over my long, ratty hair every day I lived in Japan.

It was a lifesaver.

Watching these boys, #1 overall picks, come through my local low-A QC River Bandits squad. My Puerto Rican “mom” Judy bringing Carlos Correa to heel (who, as I write these words, just proposed to his girlfriend live on tv). Mean-mugging Ed Wade from two feet away in Florida, then keeping the faith in Luhnow’s Moneyball schemes during three 100-loss seasons of misery. The first time I saw Altuve in person was with Jillian at a poorly attended preseason game at Wrigley when both ‘stros and Cubbies were at rock bottom. I thought there was a kid out at second.

He is a tiny god.

My city needed this.

It’s hurt being away from my people. Seeing Harvey displace friends and family and random strangers who will always be MY PEOPLE still makes me feel sick months later. Seeing how we’ve rallied around this team, these Astros, has been beautiful. Schoolmates, from Harvey survivors to international diaspora, are all reveling in this win with me tonight.

Today is a day that I was truly afraid that I would never see. My cynical little heart has grown three sizes.

We are Houston Strong.

This team, this ridiculous squad of talented and hilarious kids who have never known when they weren’t supposed to win (see: damn near doing it back in ’15!), inspires me. This isn’t some joyless, moneypit empire. These are brothers on the field, and I couldn’t love them more. I’ve been blasting Houston rap to keep me fired up (Paul Wall has offered free grillz to the ‘stros for making it to the WS), and even the official Astros Twitter feed honored DJ Screw back in June. You can’t help but smile.

I love my city. It’s a glorious mess, a cosmopolitan gumbo of bullshit and hustle and heart.

This series was legendary, and I’ve grown noticeably more gray since the postseason began. Full respect and love to the Dodgers - this was probably the most evenly matched WS I’ve ever seen, and you acquitted yourselves extraordinarily well. You’re going to be good for a long time.

Race you next year.

Tonight is ours.

#astros #earnedit #hustletown #houstonstrong

[ p a l e _ f a c e ]

Happy Hallows.

savor it, like crimson wine from an old goblet. this is literally what i am doing right now.

so it proved fortuitous that i finished "The Bone Garden" on August 1. just a couple weeks later the new semester began, in which my nearly half-faculty-line of overload became further... complicated... by a broken foot.

good times.

haven't had much opportunity to draw, or even particularly get into the season [the power ominously cut out as i typed these words], but ol' Rossi-time hit me up for a late cover commission. here she is.

mayyybe you can tell that i've been playing Bloodborne, which is spectacular and frustrating and regularly haunts my dreams.

postmortem on "The Bone Garden" in early November. i am proud of my child.

go 'stros!

/.n [while watching House of 1000 Corpses]

[ t h e _ b o n e _ g a r d e n ]

this one has been a long time coming.

commentary later. happy Halloween.

/.n [while listening to Misfits, "Halloween"]

critical communiques; also, musings

at last, at last! Spooky Basement is out in the wild in dead tree form. and there are t-shirts! there are all of the things. here is the complete cover, complete with implausible endorsement from an Eisner Award-winning creator (in earnest):

here is what it looks like in person! the glow on the right is not sunlight, it is purest, unfettered joy radiating from these golden pages.

kid bro has been hitting the circuit to promote his work, to which my art is loosely adhered in the fashion of a modestly committed remora. next one up is Flashback Weekend Horror Con in Chicago in a scant few days. let us infect the town with these subversive stylings.

seriously though, the booth is rad and features a Spooky Basement video game (!):

oh. but here is the big news.

THE BONE GARDEN is done. yeah. 3 or 4 years late, sure, but it is what it is. i finished it this morning. i cried a little. it will be available to the public on October 1, which is i think a fair compromise between my competing desires to (1) get this thing out there already and, to (2) ensure that people's Halloween pump levels have been primed just a touch.

i've been waiting to write those words since 2013.

there are other things in the works. i'll get around to them.

/.na [while listening to Garbage]

[ f i c t i o n _ i n _ f i v e ]

as mentioned below, Phil is back in the game and some of my stuff is getting new play. check out his Patreon page - it's a full frontal assault of my stylings. presumably, much of our work going forward will be behind a paygate [you should offer him your patronage! but if not...], so i'll continue sharing my contributions here.

embarrassingly deep now in the ancient past, i posted the first plates from a book we were working on together between 2011-12 (yowza): an illustrated compendium of some of Phil's "Fiction in Five" microfiction works. first up was "Anamelech" (Halloween 2011!), followed by "The Watchers"(6 Jan 12) and finally "The Artist" (24 Nov 14).

the book may still happen someday, but for now Phil has been piecing it out as subscriber content. no time like the present, i suppose. here we go:

"Recycled"

"Touch Button Life"

"Expiration"

"Got A Light?"

"The End"

"9/[untitled]"

i need to get back on this. "The Bone Garden" is a lurching machine with grinding gears, creeping toward the finish line. i've said that before. i mostly mean it.

/.na [while listening to White Zombie]

[ c l o w n _ m o t e l ]

partner-in-crime Phil is finally back in the game with a monthly Patreon campaign, which means new opportunities and exposure for my little corner of these electric internets. here is the first new piece from [...looks...] back in March. this was a last-second job right before i had to bounce to co-lead study abroad in Belize. escaping Iowa required me to accomplish about three weeks' worth of work in five days.

that week sucked.

the story is called "Clown Motel," and hopefully my cover properly expresses its heart as a light-hearted romp. yeah.

/.na [while listening to Paul Wall]

[ s p o o k y _ b a s e m e n t ] - LAUNCH!

so. we should probably get together more than every couple of years.

Happy Halloween.

i've wanted to do a project with kid brother since what for all practical purposes is the beginning of time. we finally pulled it off. after a successful IndieGogo campaign nearly equally as distant in the past, his book Clay Astroman's Spooky Basement: Welcome to Monsteropolis should be live any moment now. i was privileged to do the cover for this absurdity, which i suspect will satirically offend almost every demographic with the precision of an atomic clock and i will be forced to hide my involvement within moments.

it's probably going to be pretty good, if you like PUMP and monsters.

the real Hallows project has been underway for a while - rebooted "The Bone Garden" for what at its earliest could be a Christmas release. i'm still here.

back in the saddle

first day of Thanksgiving break: the games, the science, and a chance to finally bang out some art.

after a hiatus that makes me look nigh prolific by comparison, Phil Rossi is back in the podcasting/writing game. last week he 'cast a new story, "Silk and Old Tree," and after forgetting to have me do the cover in advance publicly taunted me on Facebook to "save him from crappy art." so i tried.

[edit:] upon seeing this, J proclaimed, "Well, I'm going to have nightmares! Super effective!" and gave me a high five. love my wife. also: "Needs more unicorn."

the return was marked by a brace of other pubs: one featuring not-my-best work from 2011, and another of the stories that were to comprise our short fiction collaboration that never quite got finished. [Cryptkeeper voice] "Boils and ghouls, I call this terrible tableau... The Artist."

[note: the previously unveiled two-of-ten are "Anamelech" and "The Watchers."]

finally! while the original Spooky Basement kicktibbler didn't quite make it, Clay started a new, modest indiegogo project for the first volume, Welcome to Monsteropolis. even better, it's been funded (!), but it's not too late to throw a few bucks his way and get in on the rewards. his is a bizarre and very real talent, and i'm excited to do the covers for the series.

/.n [while listening to... nothing for once. mmm.]