I'm in two gallery shows coming up. One just opened in LA at Gallery 1988. "Bob's Burgers" show. The theme was Bob's Burgers characters etc. open to interpretation. I didn't really know anything about the show. I had to brush up on it. If I had a TV I would probably watch this once in a while.

And the other group show I'll be participating in at Gallery 1988 is called "The Idiot Box". The theme is mostly television from the 90's... you know, the Idiot Box! As a little kid in the 70's, I don't remember my dad calling the television anything else but "the idiot box"! HA!

In the 90's I got hooked on The X Files. Throughout the seasons there was enough variety that I enjoyed it up until Mulder disappeared and the new guy showed up. Of course by the 2nd or 3rd season I wasn't buying Scully's skepticism, but I liked the characters by then. In this piece, I was playing around with a bunch of alien "folklore". Abductees claim missing time, triangle shaped crafts, naked on metal tables, aliens with big eyes operating or experimenting on them etc. And within the show, the ever increasing reliance on using cell phones to help move the plot along. Flip phones were the thing. I titled this one, "It's for you." The big obvious joke that refers to people having unnecessary surgery is Mulder and Scully were abducted and the aliens mixed up their heads when putting them back together since all humans look alike to aliens.

Quick posts of art for a while. Lots of busy work lately and most of it not art. Sometimes that's how it is. When I don't have the time to devote my brain to a fun project I want to create, I revisit things from my past. About twenty years ago I used to ink Dr Strange every month for Marvel comics. It was a lot of work but a great learning experience. I also did finishes on the Ghost Rider story for Marvel Comics Presents every two weeks and penciled Animal Man for Vertigo comics every month. I had no life back then! I always liked the Ghost Rider , but Dr. Strange was the book I would have loved to make. I would think about the character a lot and analyze how he was handled.

My impression was no one looked at it as a book they wanted to stay on. People I penciled had even lifted whole splash pages from other super hero books but changed it enough that the editor didn't notice. Being the guy who was inking it, I noticed it and it was probably the most aggravating part of the job! It was a typical argument that editors always heard from inkers. "I can draw better than that guy!" So I never said anything even though I thought I had a legitimate case. How can this guy be better than me if he had to copy another artist's anatomy, composition, and line-work???

I like the potential for how bizarre and visually psychedelic Dr Strange stories could be if they were handled by Moebius, or Roger Dean, of (what the hell) even me! Instead of some guy whose heart is really in to doing Wolverine, or Spawn, or Superman. Not that they aren't great artists that do that, but there is a subtle difference when the artist is actually inspired to work on the character that will always give it that extra punch.

Inks by me. You might find this very pose in an Image comic book by Mark Silvestri.

An experiment in the old sketch pad.

Truthfully, I haven't thought much about Dr Strange in a long time. I was imagining some strange other dimensional sub-world. Some kind of white globes growing, maybe they are pods or some magical egg that contains either an evil spirit or a good spirit. Also an experiment in my sketch pad with a little ink and minimal gouache.

#Comics #DoctorStrange #surreal #illustration

A lot of younger or newer artists that paint often say they never know when to stop on a painting and then they over-work it. Or they never know when it is done. I feel I usually know when to stop, especially on an illustration because there is a clear deadline. The trickier things are when there is no deadline, and the subject matter is more subjective. Then you just have to know internally what you want the end result to look like. In this case I had the poses I knew I wanted but the back ground?

This is a sci-fi illustration. The bg is totally up to me. I wanted enough information in it to put the figures in context. I was riffing off of one of my favorite artists I looked at in Heavy Metal mag. in the 80's, Tanino Liberatore. He always drew/painted Ran Xerox. Being the early 80's and I lived in a small town with not much art scene, let alone European comics scene, no one had any idea who he was or what else he had done. Then I saw a Frank Zappa album in a record store, "The Man From Utopia". Even in my early high school naivete in art I recognized his style. I didn't know much about Frank Zappa but I purchased the record immediately just for the art. I ended up getting several more Zappa albums over the years, but "Man From Utopia" was my first and probably my favorite. Especially since it was weird enough to aggravate my parents!

I've been sitting on this image in the "almost" finished stage for several months. I still need to tweak it but I don't know if most people will really see a difference from what it looks like right now.