The Mask of Fu Manchu - I had wanted to continue working on my Universal 50's Sci-Fi movie posters, and have been playing around with a couple different ideas, but nothing had completely clicked. Sometime around Halloween though, I bought a boxed set of MGM 30's-era horror films, called The Hollywood Legends of Horror collection. It featured the films Mad Love, Doctor X, The Return of Doctor X, Devil Doll, Mark of the Vampire...and The Mask of Fu Manchu.

I had seen Fu Manchu once, about 10 years ago, and didn't remember much from it. But watching it anew, the movie really came alive for me--it's totally insane. Depravity of all kinds, torture, rioting mobs, severed limbs...this film has everything, and was made before the Hayes Code really cracked down on movie content, so they threw in everything but the kitchen sink here. And presiding over it all is Boris Karloff, an old hand at this stuff, and Myrna Loy, for pete's sake, who had a legendary career in much more respectable films ahead of her.

Anyway, the dang movie got me inspired, and I started messing around with the Karloff potrait--I had had an idea in my head of what he should look like, and how he'd frame the rest of the poster. So I started on it, and old Boris came together quite well. Then I came back to it a day later, and the ideas just kept comin', where to lay in the type, what colors to use, all of it.

One of my biggest issues when I try these retro-type posters is, try as I might, they always end up looking too modern to me. I find that my design--what looks "right" to me--tend to lean toward a more modern look. This time, though, I found the right color combos that looked cool to me (lighter, more subtle instead of the in-your-face tones I normally use), but also genuinely old-fashioned (I was also looking at actual Fu Manchu posters also to know what to try differently). When all was said and done, I felt that this design could actually pass for vintage, maybe. I even spaced the type of the co-stars in a manner that looks weird to my eye, but I know is also time-period-accurate.

London After Midnight - I was obviously on some sort of creative tear here, since I jumped into this one the day after finishing Phantom. I knew that this was the other really iconic image that Lon Chaney is remembered for, even though the film itself is now considered a "lost" film.

To be honest, once I had the main image of the piece, the rest of it came together fairly easily--the only other element I knew I had to nail was the font. I knew the font should be more ornate than most of the ones I've used, mostly because this was an MGM film, which tended to be that way, aesthetically.

And since Chaney was pretty much the whole show in LAM (promotionally, at least, since I obviously haven't seen the film), I didn't think I needed lots of pictures of the other cast--just one would do it. Overall, I'm very pleased with how this came out.

Mark of the Vampire - For this poster, I had decided to try that other Bela-as-a-vampire movie, Mark of the Vampire.

MOTV is really more of a mystery/thriller with some horror elements thrown in, but Bela does look just like the Count here, and to give the film even more visual kick is the addition of Carol Borland as a female vampire. So I knew I had to include her as well, and I wanted to stay away from the traditional blood-red color scheme and go with something more muted. I wonder how Bela felt being the face that sold the movie, yet it's Lionel Barrymore who gets top billing?

Mad Love - Right after finishing MOTV I had wanted to do another one, so I jumped right into Mad Love, a truly demented thriller starring Peter Lorre who I knew would provide a real grabber of a central image--his bald head and beady eyes makes for an unusual main character.

It was nearly impossible to find any images of Lorre's co-star Frances Drake--the object of Lorre's obsession--so I ended up having her be a lot smaller than I had planned, but I think in the end it worked out. I like the abstract graphic hand reaching out to grab Drake, and how it works against the main axis of the piece. The off-kilter lettering helps with the whole something-ain't-right feel, too.

In terms of the classic 30s MGM horror films, I'm pretty much left with Devil Doll, Doctor X, and The Return of Doctor X. Since I find DD to be pretty dull, I think I'll be visiting the good(read: evil) doctor soon...

These two posters, based on the 1960 classic The Time Machine and the 1951 movie serial Blackhawk, fall into the former catagory--in fact, they use basically the same format, at least up top--a separate image and part of the poster, leaving the rest to be the main selling points of the movie.

I knew I wanted The Time Machine to look different than all my others--there was a very definite change in poster aesthetics from the 1940s to the early 1960s, and I wanted to reflect that in the colors and overall "busyness" of the piece.

I didn't have room for it here, but I thought a great viral marketing idea for a new Time Machine movie would be to put up "Missing" posters all around major cities, with the picture of the time traveler and asking people if they've seen him, leaving those little pull-off phone numbers at the bottom. Anyone who bothers to check up on it gets fed further clues to the story, etc. I'm an idea guy.

Joel Martin - "The Man Behind the Music" - This was a piece I was commissioned to do for a magazine article on Joel Martin, a music producer and entrepreneur, who has worked with people as diverse as Eminem, George Clinton, and The Romantics.

They wanted some sort of rock poster type feel for the cover, but that was the extent of their ideas. I had planned to just put together a rough for them to look at, but when I sat down on a Saturday afternoon(with Johnny under my chair, snoring contentedly, and Sports Night: The Complete Series on the DVD player) something came over me--in an instant,

I had an idea in my head what the poster should look like. I had originally thought of a late 60s, psychedelic poster, like for The Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane. But then I thought a better idea was a riff on those classic, fun, dynamic Motown Records concert posters--that way I could work in pictures of some of the famous people he's worked with, instead of just being stuck with a picture of a guy nobody recognizes. As I kept working, the damn thing kept getting better and better, and each little piece fell into place like clockwork.

By around dinnertime, I had produced this--the rare piece that actually looks better on the screen than it did in my head(that never happens). I had forgotten to eat lunch and other than to take Johnny for a walk, I never stopped working for about five and a half hours.

Unfortunately, soon after this the whole project fell through(d'oh!)--the article, now finished, focused more about his past than the people he worked with, and the magazine decided to run photos from his life rather than use any illustrations at all.

So while I'm of course disappointed the piece never ran, I am so glad I saw this through to the end, because it's instantly become one of my all-time favorite pieces, and it was a total joy putting it together.

It was inspired, of all things, by an audio commentary track for the movie Road House--no, not the Patrick Swayze one, a 1948 film noir starring Richard Widmark and Ida Lupino.

As I've mentioned here before, I love audio commentaries, since I frequently have them on as I work. I can't look at the screen too much, so when I find a movie with a really good commentary track I find myself listening to it over and over. (I think I actually wore out my Superman: The Movie DVD listening to director Richard Donner and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz talk over it so many times)

Anyway, this movie had commentary by film historians Kim Morgan and Eddie Muller. (I've met Eddie once, and he was an unfailingly nice guy, and his book of film noir posters The Art of Noir even sort of inspired an earlier poster of mine), and the two of them were so fun to listen to, admitting to deeply-held passions for Widmark and Lupino (respectively) that it was like having two really interesting friends sitting with you at a bar, telling you about their favorite movie. And while I enjoyed Road House all by itself, its the commentary track I'm sure I'll be listening to again.

So as I was listening, I got an idea to pair up two legendary film noir stars that (to my knowledge) never did a film together--Sterling Hayden and Richard Widmark--and contrive some sort of early 50s film noir movie that they could star in.

I then came up with the title, and that led me to a plot--two brothers, one a cop, one a crook--in love with the same woman. It practically wrote itself!

Visually, I really tried tamping down all of my flashiest design ideas to make this thing look as period as possible. All told, I'm pretty happy with it, because I think I accomplished that. To me, it looks like the kind of movie that, if it had existed, Morgan and Muller could do a really great commentary track for.

The modern DVD packaging for the serials (there were two, a few years apart) completely avoids this problem altogether by using newly-made modern-style drawings of Grim Avenger of the Night Batman, bearing no relation to what it waiting for you inside.

I didn't want to cheat that nakedly, so I forced myself to use the actual Batman from the serial--with some changes. Instead of the traditional blues, I put a flat black on Batman to give him a slightly more cool look.

To play up the comic book angle, I went with a style that looks like a comic book page, and the use of some comic book-y fonts pulled the whole thing together for me.

Finally, I added that orange brush effect behind him, and not only did make for a nice contrast with all the blue, but it was the kind of amorphous blob of color I've seen on posters from that era.

I didn't yell out "Eureka!", but I could have.

The Poster Project - March 2008 - For a few weeks in February and March, I was having a tough time getting motivated to do any new illustrations outside of my normal client obligations.

This bothered me a lot, because normally I am very prolific, and doing all this extra work has paid enormous dividends for me--I get to hone my skills, I get to see what kinds of designs and ideas "work" and which don't, which helps me come to any individual client a better artist. Also, I simply enjoy the process of sitting down at my desk and creating something. It's relaxing.

But for whatever reason I just couldn't get motivated, until in early March I picked up a book of posters designed by the design agency Modern Dog. They started in the mid-80s, a brought a really fresh asthetic to the art of poster design. I had never even heard of these people, and here was page after page of beautiful, inspiring work.

I ended up reading the whole book in one sitting, just before I went to bed, and after I turned in I found I couldn't sleep. All of a sudden I started getting all kinds of ideas and had an overwheling desire to start being creative again.

So that very night I decided to start on what I informally call The Poster Project--I would design and execute one new poster, on any subject, in any style, per day. I would force myself to try and come up with the best stuff I could. If I didn't, fine, but at the very least it would get my creative juices flowing again. And boy, did it!

In August 2004, I was contacted by American Prospect, a political magazine about doing several illustrations to accompany a series of articles called "A New Progressive Era?", all concerning what a Kerry Presidency might be like, how to achieve it, etc. The art director there wanted a series of WPA-styled "posters" to illustrate some of the themes of the articles, as well as a one full-page piece to kick off the whole thing.

I was given several of the articles and other topics and asked to choose which inspired me the most. I settled on the above six, ones dealing with building the labor unions, equal rights for gays and lesbians, investing in infrastructure, leadership, getting young people to vote, and how to take on the curiously-named The Right. One thing I definitely wanted to do was approximate some of the various styles of WPA art--the abstract silhouettes of Building a Better Tomorrow, the fun, loose The Time is Now, the more cartoony A Good Investment, the serious, propaganda-ish Equal Rights. I wanted lots of different colors and ways of using them, and with the text, a somewhat-serious-yet-cheerily-optimistic tone, which the WPAs had (no doubt reflecting the tone of the man whose administration created the program, Franklin Delano Roosevelt). I wrote the text myself, mostly just to show themagazine where I thought their text would go.

To my delight, when I submitted the pieces, the magazine was so happy with what I had come up with that the art AND the text remained unchanged--I had managed to strike the exact tone AP was looking for. There's only been a handful of times when a piece I submitted went from my first "draft" to printed page, and it felt like that, for this assignment, I could do no wrong.

The final touch to all of them was just to entertain myself. Most of the WPA posters had a small credit line on each, listing where they were made--"Chicago Works Progress Administration", etc. So I added the line "Works Progress Administration Marlton, NJ" to each one, just to give them each a little more verisimilitude--my new favorite word, and one I finally stopped using incorrectly!

Brothers 4 Life - A good buddy of mine named Markus hired me to do a piece for a relative of his, Julius, as a graduation present. Julius has a good buddy named Manny Hernandez who are, as they call themselves, "Brothers for life."

They had a picture taken of themselves, and wondered if Markus knew any artists who could turn it into something more. The light went off above Markus' head, and he told me his idea--to portray the BFL's in the context of a 70s Blaxploitation movie poster, like for movies like Super Fly, Cotton Comes to Harlem, or Coffy. This sounded like enormous fun!

After finding out some likes and dislikes of the guys, I searched for a nice, super-groovy 70s font and started throwing it together. I added some girls in bikinis, the skyline of Atlantic City, a Red Cross (Julius is a RN), and another relic of 70s blaxploitation films, a huge Caddy. I also added a movie rating, and a logo for American International, a studio that produced many of these movies. The hyperbolic tagline at the top is also my own invention.

Those 70s posters were full of multi-colored backgrounds, featuring the people and places of the movie, so it was fairly easy putting all the above elements together. I set them all with lessened and varying transparency, that way the BFLs really popped off the poster. Since my style isn't drawn with colored pencils or painted, there was a limit to how close to the look of those 70s posters I could get, but I think I achieved a nice combination. I was also happy that this piece looks very different than a lot of my other work--lots and lots colors, as opposed to the limited palatte I frequently use. Markus and family really like it, too, and it's great to know that the subjects got a real kick out of it as well.

Carnac the Magnificent - I loved--love--Johnny Carson. Always did, even when I was a little kid, and didn't understand half of the jokes. When the Carson Tonight Show began it's last-couple-of-months-wrap-up, each show filled with the hugest names in showbiz, I watched it every night. Most of show biz is phony, of course, but watching giants like Clint Eastwood or Steve Martin stop in one last time made me feel that this emotion was real. Looking back on the shows now, I'm struck by the gentleness of Johnny--he got laughs at other people's expense of course, but it never seemed as callous as a lot of the comedy nowadays.

Right after Johnny died, I wanted to do some kind of piece, some sort of tribute. I caught a pic of Johnny as one of my favorite characters of his, Carnac the Magnificent (Answer: "106 in Los Angeles." Question: "Under the Reagan plan, how old will you have to be to collect Social Security?"). Knowing that Johnny started out as a magician, and that it was a favorite pasttime of his, I thought, why not do a Carnac concert poster?

Once I had that idea, it was enormous fun putting this together. I know I wanted a mid-60s ultra-show-bizy look, with all those weird squiggles and star shapes. The opening line "Silence, please" was, of course, what Carnac would always ask for before attempting to divine the answer in the envelope held to his forehead. The show had to be at 11:30pm, the time that the world got to see Johnny, every night for 30 years. I fiddled with it for a long while, moving eah little piece back and forth--I designed the living hell out of this thing. It had a white background for the longest time, and then when I sort-of accidentally dropped black in the background, it pulled together for me, giving me that late-night, night-clubby feel that I knew I wanted.

Maybe this is a show you could go see, in some nightclub in the sky...

Cat O'Nine Lives - This was soooo much fun. Even though posters are double, triple, etc. the amount of work than doing just one portrait piece, I never have more fun than trying to arrange all the various elements, like it's a big jigsaw puzzle and the ultimate solution will reveal itself if I just keep going. The time seems to fly by, hours and hours, yet it never seems like work.

This time I wanted to try a noir thriller. I knew I wanted the classic noir icons--hard-boiled cop/detective, cityscape, shadows, and of course a sexy babe, preferably one that looks like she could kill you or kiss you. Not wanting to borrow a title or taglines from any established movie, obscure or no, I went for a run to clear my head and try and think of a good title.

About halfway in, I knew I wanted a sexy babe with some sort of cat connotation..Cat O'Nine Tails? Not bad... The Cat With Nine Lives? Hey, wait a minute...

So once I had the kitschy title in place, the whole thing started falling into place. I have a book (a couple, in fact) of classic film noir posters, and I really liked the hero-behind-or-up-against-a-real-or-metaphorical-wall motif running in a couple of them. I knew I wanted our hero looking at this mix, tempted but (of course) wary at the same time. I kept contrasting the colors between the two til I settled on almost a total split of hot and cold. Somewhere along the line I came up with the idea this was part of a series, which gave me the chance to create a second logo for it..."A New Johnny Chance Thriller!"

After adding some small details, like the bullets and the cat's eyes, I stopped and looked back on what I had created. And I really, really liked it.

Dark City - I recently read a wonderful book called Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir by Eddie Muller; it's a big fun book all about the film noir movement in movies of the 40s and 50s, the people that made them, and all the juicy details involved. Going through the book, I couldn't help but reconnect to the original inspiration for my art style--it was the stark black and white shots of Orson Welles in The Third Man that got me thinking about how you could convey information with just a little bit of color and shadow.

I've also thought how sad it is that most of these films are not available in most local, Blockbuster-minded (in more ways than one) video stores. So I decided to come up with a poster for the film festival of my dreams: an all film-noir marathon, showing nothing but a combination of my favorites (Touch of Evil, Double Indemnity, Phantom Lady) and Films I Haven't Yet Seen But Want To (Narrow Margin, Detour, Scarlet Street).

I used what I thought was an iconic image--the guy's got a gun, sure, but he looks a tad nervous (an element in nearly every Noir film). I decided to limit myself entirely to black and white, something I hadn't done in a long time. Since the book was the inspiration for it, I named this imaginary festival in its honor. Once I added a suitable overheated bunch of taglines ("Murder at any moment! Suspense in every step!"--nicked from the poster of the ultra-obscure 1947 film Desperate), I had eveything I'd ever want to see in a Film Noir Festival poster.

Welcome to Dark City...but watch your step!

Obama '08 - I wanted to do an old-style campaign poster, pure and simple. This is one of the rare times that the image in my head came out on the screen almost exactly verbatim.

I like the big open spaces, the intense, no-detail white shirt, and the slightly old-timey font, complete with inspirational quote. It feels a little like the Uncle Sam "I Want You" poster, which is also something I had in mind when doing this. I definitely waned a "brighter tomorrow"-type feel, but not beat you over the head with it.

Maybe sometime I'll get up the guts to send this to the Obama campaign directly...

*Update* Since I wrote the above, I did indeed find the requisite guts to send it to the campaign, offering my services to them as an illustrator and/or graphic designer. Maybe Sen. Obama will be walking by some staffer's computer when its on their screen, point to it, and exclaim: "I want that guy!"

For this one, the idea I had in my head was a poster that could be repurposed with different quotes, so the layout came together rather easily. I liked the red/white/blue combined with the monochromatic portrait, so the main challenge was the quote.

Not too long ago, I watched a documentary about the Helvetica font (yes; I'm such a graphic designer nerd I watch movies about fonts) and it made me have a new appreciation for the old standard. I normally never use it because it is so ubiquitous, but this time I liked the universality of its look, and once I applied it I knew this was the perfect time to use it.

But instead of working on something nasty and sarcastic, which I think would've been depressing and sour to work on--I decided to take a more positive approach. If polar bears could vote, who would they side with?

I dabbled with having a lot more detail on it, but the simple look and few colors seemed to work best for me. If I may pat myself on the back, I thought it had that simplicity that some of my favorite WPA posters have, and that's what I was going for.

Oilcan Drive - My buddy Sean Tiffany--my first Kubert school roomate--has always been a fountain for comic book ideas. He's come up with a couple different totally complete worlds and the characters that inhabit them. Like me, he's done well for himself as freelance illustrator, and we're in regular commisseration about our similar career paths (plus I know he's home during the day, like me).

One Sean's newest ideas is OilCan Drive, a comic about a rock band set in the a post-apocalyptic world. There's music, fun, adventure, and a bass-playing monkey! But don't take my word for it--go to Sean's website and check it out for yourself.

Anyway, for Sean's birthday, I wanted to do some kind of OCD piece for him. I had in mind those classic, 60s-era house ads DC Comics used to run for its books, as well as a rough, scrappy kind of look, but with a semi-jokey tagline so you'd get the sense of what the book was like. The DC-house-ad part shows in the "Look for This Cover!" line, pointing to the cover as if you could go to your local newsstand and pick up the first issue (if only...).

Anyway, I sent it to Sean, and, thankfully, he really liked it. He told me he wants to use the piece for the possible OCD music CD (Sean, in addition to being a great artist, also dabbles in music, the bastard), which I took as a real compliment. So, hopefully sometime in the not too distant future, we'll get to see (and hear) more from Oil Can Drive!

Silence of Night - This image came to me, almost fully-formed, while I watching a Boris Karloff movie one afternoon. I made a mental note to work on it later, and then, afraid I'd forget, got up to do it.

This is another one of my made-up wish-list movies, and this time I thought I'd try my hand at 'literate horror', an informal genre that was pioneered by Val Lewton in the 40s and picked up somewhat by films like The Haunting, Curse of the Demon, and Rosemary's Baby.

This film was put together by a dream team for any horror-film fan: Vincent Price, star of approximately 10,000 horror films, Claire Bloom (The Haunting), a screenplay by master horror/sci-fi author Richard Matheson, and directed by longtime Lewton director Mark Robson. I imagined a screenwriter and director who wanted to give long-time horror star Vincent Price a chance to something more subtle, more serious, and maybe more frightening than the usual boogie-man parts he was doing (like the one Boris Karloff got with Val Lewton back in the 40s).

To that end, the poster would be more subtle, less in-your-face. It would highlight one bold, distinctly vague-yet-unsettling image, and try to establish what kind of horror movie it was. The only thing I added was the silhouette of the mysterious stranger--is he discovering that skull, or did he put it there? The fact that it also looks just a little bit like a tombstone only underlined that sense of uncertainty to me...

Sisterhood of Sin - I hadn't done one of my fake movie posters in a while, and was itching to put another one together. Each time I do one, I think they come out just a little bit better than the last one. The last one I had done, Cat O'Nine Lives, was a 50's pastiche, so I knew I wanted to try and mimic another era of moviemaking this time around. I sat down with my lapboard and just did some rough sketches and then tried to write some taglines to match.

I liked the idea of multi-panel look, and that immediately read to me as late 60s/early 70s-era movies. So I created my own exploitation film, The Sisterhood of Sin. It would have sex, violence, crazy dialogue, maybe some car chases...and no time for subtlety (as the poster suggests). It would feature actresses from some of the more notorious women's revenge films and in my fantasy world would be the ne plus ultra of this kind of film. It would star the late (*sniff*) Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, who, in her title role in the soft-adult version of Cinderella, was instrumental in nudging me down the path of Becoming A Man. Thanks, Rainbeaux.

I put this together over a few days, piece by piece, and really enjoyed myself. I think this has a nice, open, fun look, and totally devoid of subtlety. I wish they still made movie posters like this today, and I wish I was the one doing them.

The Strange Case of Mr.X - I'm not really sure how or why I started this piece, or how it ended up here, but, not for nothing, here's a movie poster for "The Strange Case of Mr.X" a movie that does not exist, directed and starring a group of people that never all worked together at the same time.

I had originall wanted to try doing some portraits in a more simple, cartoony style. I had just finished the exhausting NBA All-Star Game art, which were highly detailed, and wanted to try something in the totally opposite direction. I didn't want to bother with a likeness either, and just see what I could do with a creepy-type portrait and nothing else.

So, starting with the creepy close-up, I added the mad-scientist-like red-tinted glasses, a spider-web-and-bloody-hand-print background, and tried to imagine a movie that would fit what I had already created. Since I was doing the whole thing from scratch, I thought why not just make up a movie, as well? So I had horror movie legends like Boris Karloff (Frankenstein, of course) , Peter Lorre (Mad Love), and Ernest Thesiger (Bride of Frankenstein) in a movie directed and produced by the team of Jacques Torneur and Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie).

This poster is a little more comic book-y than my Universal Horror posters, and I think that's fitting, since it matches the style of the artwork, and I wanted to go in that direction anyway. And because I can never leave well enough alone, I do plan to do more in this style, and maybe create a whole slate of Movies That Don't Exist But Would Be Great If They Did.

The Alamo Drafthouse - The Alamo Drafthouse is a super-cool retro old-time movie house located in Austin, Texas. The owners and operators are real movie fans and try to make seeing movies a unique and memorable experience. They are friends with two friends of mine, Dan and Harry, who are half of Jersey's own Exhumed Films. After a recent trip to Texas, they came up with the idea of hiring me to create a one-of-a-kind movie poster as a way to say thanks for their hospitality while Dan and Harry were visiting. The AD owners are big fans of 60s spaghetti westerns, so Dan gave me some parameters of what he thought would be appropriate; the rest was up to me.

I knew immediately what kind of look I wanted--one grabber of a central image, and alongside it a collage of images, probably monotone; rendered all with that sort of scratchy, colored-pencil look. I wanted this too look dirty and grimy (like Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West), and my style tends to be, as one art director put it, "uber clean." So I printed out the main figure and went over it in a colored pencil layer, scanned it in, and layed it on top. Only problem was it was too dirty and I felt like the strength of my work was disappearing beneath the concept. Better in theory than in practice, and all that.

Then reduced the colored pencil layer's opacity, so my original work would shine through, yet there would still be traces of the dirty and unrulyness that I thought would make this look authentic. It worked! This, of course, led to more work since I then realized all the parts of the poster needed to be done this way. So I did it all up, re-showed it to Dan, got the thumbs up, and now it won't be too long before the wonderful people behind the actual Alamo Drafthouse get to see it. I can't wait.

(BTW, for those of you who haven't me in person, yes, indeed, that is me as the cowboy. I think I definitely have a movie career ahead of me in case this art thing doesn't work out)

Adopt A Pet - Ever since I discovered the WPA posters of the 30s and 40s, I have made a concious effort to try and infuse some of my poster work with the same level of beauty, skill, and aesthetic grace that the best of those posters had.

My whole family is very animal-centric, and that only got amplified by a factor of a million once I met Trace. No one cares for animals more (she'll pick up an ant-infested chicken bone laying in the street, just to ensure some random dog doesn't come by and choke on it), no one walks the walk like she does when trying to care for them. I'm not quite so selfless (though I too love animals), and one of the best things I think Trace has done for me is make me a better, less self-centered person in that regard.

Anyway, I thought what would a WPA-style poster look like if the idea was to promote animal adoption? Of course, I would find the cutest puppy and kitten I could (the kitten, purely accidentally?, looks remarkably like a very young Berry T. Goll) and have them stare doe-eyed out into the viewer, hopefully tugging your heartstrings with their itty-bitty wittle paws.

The bigger dilemma was what else could go on there--I had the animals, but now what? I messed with this thing for a few days, racking my brain for some other things to add. I think I was scared of the open space.

But soon I realized that, with this piece, the way it was, I probably came closer to the actual look of a WPA poster, with its main central image and big tag line. I decided to leave it alone after that and now I see it as one of my most successful of the WPA imitations.

Exhumed Films - I've mentioned before how much fun Exhumed Films are (is?)--the chance to see cheesy, creepy, gory, or just plain odd films on the big screen, as a double-feature, along with trailers, is not to be missed.

One of the Exhumed guys, Dan Fraga, had seen and really liked the Universal Horror movie posters, and had said he would like to see me mimic that basic design but with more Exhumed-centric characters.

After some research, I settled on characters from Halloween (an Exhumed staple), The Thing (1982), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and, as the centerpiece, another Exhumed mainstay, Jessica Harper from Suspiria. Since this piece would end up on a t-shirt (to be sold at the shows, hopefully adding to the funds needed to keep doing them), the poster had to be kept to a minimum of colors, and no combination looked better than black, white, and red.

I changed the background motif from the Universal ones, I thought to better match the look on Harper's face--I wanted that feeling of POW!, where, like in the movie, you prepare for something really bad to happen. I used a different, more modern, funky font, and added Exhumed's established tagline.

The guys liked what I had done, and the shirt went on sale as of August 28th, Lesbian Vampire Double Feature Night. On stage before the show, Dan gave me a really nice thank-you, and I even got a polite round of applause (something rarely heard here in the studio)from the crowd, who were eagerly awaiting the lesbian vampires. Hopefully they'll sell lots of shirts!

Flying - One of the things I've always been interested in is the art of poster design. I have one wall here at NamtabCave covered in repros of those old WPA posters. There's nothing I like more than producing an illustration(s) and then having to work them in a grander design with type and such.

"Come Fly Away" was my attempt at a hybrid of advertising and public service announcement. Wouldn't this look nice to look at in an airport somewhere, while the x-ray guys are scanning your Sketchers for plutonium? I wanted something happy, up, and made travel seem like the adventure it can be. It was the stylistic opposite of the SOL poster, too (a poster done at nearly the same time as this one, below), something I was keen to do. See if you can find your city!

Statue of Liberty - I have one wall here at NamtabCave covered in repros of those old WPA posters. There's nothing I like more than producing an illustration(s) and then having to work them in a grander design with type and such.

Awhile back I sat down to create a series of them, on all different topics--tourism, advertising, etc. Originall the poster at far left started out as a "Visit NYC" type of thing, but when I couldn't marry the tag lines I had in my head with image of Lady Liberty, it morphed into a political-action, activist type of thing. This was one of the rare times when what I saw in my head actually made it to the paper (or screen). I ended up being so in love with this thing that I had at least three, to me, perfectly usable versions, until I pulled the trigger and decided on this one. I've found that I'm a lot more interested in politics these days, much more aware than I used to be, so this won't be the last of its kind.

Radio - Another in my series of WPA-inspired retro-modern posters, this time promoting your local radio. For whatever reason, I find myself listening to a lot more talk radio (NPR, thank you very much) than music CDs while working, and I love getting caught up on the days events without having to sit through ten minutes of news anchor chatter and footage of car accidents. I also really enjoy old-time radio programs, as well as audio books--I really do find I use my imagination more when it's up to me to provide the visuals.

I really do think that radio could make a comeback; and when I let my mind wander I tell myself I'll actually sit down, write my own radio show, get some friends to perform it, then broadcast the thing on the web just to see if anyone enjoys it. It's kind of a crazy idea; but it's one I've had that just won't go away, so I know there must be something to it.

Anyway, I wanted to make radio seem exciting and fun. The mike illustration had a lot of heavy blacks, but it seemed too dark and grim, tinting it all in blues made it look less so, and I found it popped right off the orange background. Once I found the right fonts it came together pretty quickly.