Cartoonist Commentary, Issue 2, Serious Creatures
Serious Creatures Issue 2
“Lifecast”
Cover
The cover for this issue is an homage to this classic Post cover by Stevan Dohanos, NOT Norman Rockwell. I think I found it looking online for Rockwell covers though.
Credits Page
Dedicated to my Mom because this is the motherfucking Mom issue! …Weird to use motherfucking now isn’t it?
...It is.
Page 1
It was really easy to lapse into monster philosophy and using masks as metaphors with this story but instead of avoiding it I steered right into it.
And my answer to the favorite universal monster question is honestly Dracula because I’m very unsympathetic to myself BUT I wish it was the Gillman because he’s just so damn groovy looking.
This page makes me want to make a Monster Squad fan comics STAT.
Page 2
I decided early on to do the Tom and Jerry thing and never show the mom’s boyfriends’ faces because the point is they’re so interchangeable.
Panel 6, note the TV playing the original It Knocks movie on the screen. Which is a little nod to John Carpenter’s Halloween where the original The Thing is playing on a TV in a scene. Carpenter going on to make the remake made that such a slick little detail. Oh, my wife Taylor was the one who thought of the film title It Knocks and it pisses me off because it’s so damn good.
Page 3
It felt important to have the abusive, drunk idiot boyfriend figure also be the one to clumsily give Bobby a crooked compliment. Because in my experience some of the worst people in your life are also the ones who tell you some of the sweetest things you’ll ever hear.
Page 4
Growing up I had a lot of friends who I confused by telling them I didn’t want to play with them at times. It wasn’t anything against them I just liked being alone sometimes. In fact I needed to be alone at times. Because it let me get lost in my imagination.
The washes in Tucson Arizona were a big part of my growing up, exploring the tunnels there, daring myself to go deeper into the dark than the last time I was there….Well, it was Arizona, maybe I was just trying to hide from the sun…
Speaking of hiding from the sun there’s a reason why Bobby doesn’t see his reflection in the last panel there.
Page 5
Harper Feckle is based on my own mother in almost every way, including her look. Which made me realize how much my mom looks like Lucille Ball. She’s named Harper after Harper Lee because To Kill a Mockingbird was one of my mother’s favorite books as a young woman.
Page 6
This isn’t any kind of exaggeration; this is my mom. She was pretty hardcore. If anything, this is tame compared to some of the other stuff she’s done.
Also, there was a period after writing this page that “shitneck” occupied a top position in my insult lexicon.
Page 7
This is of course an homage to the original King Kong poster art -which I love and which is iconic -but yeah, the proportions on the airplanes and the girl in Kong’s hands are way off. So I thought I’d have Bobby comment on that in case people thought I was just being lazy as an artist.
This also continues the trend of having Bobby posed as a prominent damsel/and or female character from a movie poster which will culminate in his sexy Princess Leia pose next issue.
I looked up the Hollywood sign from 1975 just in case it looked different that year (there have been a few variations throughout the years) and sure enough it was in a terrible state that year and a few others. Letters had been burnt and it looked very Mad Maxy and whatnot; so that’s why it’s all wonked up here.
“The director I worked with on that terrible raunchy ape flick…” is a reference to John Landis and his first movie Schlock, which is also one of Rick Baker’s first movies he headed up special fx on too.
Rick Baker is a deep appreciator of apes and ape characters and has revisited the topic time and time again throughout his career.
Page 8
John Landis was the first “Beard” I knew had to have an analogue to make this story work; thus Wolf Beard. The film with the cocaine budget was Blues Brothers.
Page 9
I like the layout on this page, it’s playful but still easily readable. I stand by my unifying dork theory.
Page 11
This is when I realized how many directors were white guys with beards and glasses and how that sucks for real life social reasons; as well as for art itself; because if most of a medium comes from one similar swathe of people that gets boring quick but most importantly; this hegemony sucks for me as the guy who had to draw a book full of these white, bespectacled and bearded men. Because how the fuck was I going to make them look different from one another?
The trick is to try and latch on to individual visual cues and then ratchet them up to eleven. So, Shark Beard always has a baseball cap. Wolf Beard is always in suit (even though Landis is usually a suit guy only while working) Near Beard is always smoking…
No Beard was a bit of a problem because before starting this project I had only really seen Joe Dante as he is now; an older guy without his enormous fish tank glasses he used to rock back when he made Gremlins and The Howling. And it turns out that with his longer hair and those glasses he looks an awful lot like Bobby Feckle!
But I figured out to make him and Bobby look different; I gave the Dante analogue blue hair instead of grey.
Oh, and the character of No Beard’s real name is Moe Virgil because I’m a genius; and when I see the name Dante I think of Dante’s Inferno and Dante is of escorted through the underworld by Virgil.
GENIUS.
Page 12
The ocean’s a big part of this book; so I had to work in a mention of sirens.
Page 15
Ronnie! I think Ronnie’s got some of the best fashion sense in the book so that’s fun to draw. She doesn’t get too much to do in this issue but later I enjoyed giving her more to say and do. She became one of my favorites quickly.
Page 16 and 17 spread
I went through my Spawn issues 3 and 4 to loom over the spreads that McFarlane did there because they had POV character’s hands large in the foreground on them and I wanted to see how to make that work with big spreads.
Obviously, this was a blast to draw and surprisingly for such a potential Easter egg hunt type of shot there’s really only a few; most of these ghouls are just original creeps.
The big one is the homage to the Kirby created OMAC and its “Build-A-Friend” severed woman in a box nightmare image.
The creature just above her can easily be one of the Crepusculoids from my other comic Lumen. And there’s a couple of creatures here or there that will reappear years later in the space bar sequence which we’ll see next issue.
Page 18
Lon Chaney Jr. Jr. name is for the ages. I love drawing Scottish Terriers.
Page 19
Jack Barber destroying a mask he just worked on that looks great is actually inspired by something that Rob Bottin did (not Rick Baker) according to the book Rubberhead by Steve Johnson. Steve Johnson is a special fx artist known for work on Ghostbusters, Fright Night, Big Trouble in Little China and he worked under both Rick Baker and Rob Bottin on American Werewolf and The Howling. Johnson tells a story about working on The Howling and Bottin destroying a perfectly great looking werewolf sculpture he made himself with a sledgehammer. Johnson is aghast afterwards and asks Bottin, "Why did you do that?" and Bottin coolly replies, “I can do better.”
It also reminds me a bit of something else I wrote, Nefarious Twit, when a writer burns an unsatisfactory draft of his own manuscript in front of someone who thought it was great. The writer tells him something like, “We have to destroy it in order to move on from it.”
Page 20
Trying my hand at a Frank Miller 16 panel Dark Knight grid. To me this worked because it’s basically a montage scene.
The Orwellian Blacksploitation film Bigger Brotha isn’t based on anything really, I just thought it sounded awesome and could have a righteous Curtis Mayfield or The Brothers Johnson soundtrack.
I did have an Uncle Mike and he was a Vietnam vet.
This is the first mention of Cab Reynolds who’s the Roger Corman of our world.
The last couple panels with Jack going method on playing a monkey (yes, ape, I know, I know) that’s just another nod to Rick Baker’s affection of simians and their portrayal. Plus, he did wear the suit for the King Kong remake so I figure he went full Dustin Hoffman for the role.
Page 21
Wolf Beard…fucking Wolf Beard. Okay, Landis did really insist on having the wolf in his flick be on all fours and he and Rick Baker had been working on the project for years before it ever got greenlit.
My challenge here was to make the character of Wolf Beard not so obnoxious or toxic that the reader just out and out hated him. Because then it becomes too easy not to care about his movie happening or not. And because the real guy he’s based on is a fairly charismatic guy despite being a deeply fucked up person. His humor was sardonic and rode that Chevy Chase wave of being right to the hilt of full on asshole but goddamn it-he was funny.
So I went through a few drafts trying to find his voice.
Page 22
I think I’m just trying to talk about what it’s like being an artistic, creative kid in a family that doesn’t know quite what to do with that. No one outwardly discourages you, they want to support you, but it’s like you’re speaking an entirely different language. Also note, another headless boyfriend for mom.
Page 23
There are a couple “family” shots with Bobby at the movies with Jack and Ronnie and later on the rest of their extended adopted family; I think he looks happiest in these shots.
Page 24
The gothic candles are supposed to be a little hint at a dark initiation into a fraternal order of occult goings-on or something sort of vibe. Just playing up Bobby’s whole monster, vampire outlook at growing up and becoming an artist and becoming more and more estranged from his family…
The song “Frankenstein” will forever remind me of the intro to Wayne’s World 2.
“Party on, Wayne.”
