I’m making a few adjustments to this website. Finally. Today’s changes were simple – I’ve moved the Daughter of Spiders and Newsletters banner links. They are now subpages under the Miscellania drop down menu.
The Groovy Frankensteins Strike Back!
Wilbur, Frankie and Helen
They don’t like you. They don’t like anyone.
Bloodsucking Atomic Zombie Fishmen Never Die!
You’d think that teenagers would learn to stay away from places where they are regularly killed and eaten. 
Valorous Cats and the Great War
It’s been a busy last couple months. I’ve been doing illustrations for two successful Kickstarters.
The first – Horrors of War – is a collection of Call of Cthulhu scenarios written by Adam Scott Glancy set during World War One. That one funded back in 2014. I originally contributed an illustration to the original Kickstarter video and illustrations to one of the scenarios. After that my life got too complicated for me to commit to meeting deadlines. Mr. Glancy’s life got complicated as well and work on the project stalled.
Things have simplified for me, enough that when he contacted me earlier this year I was able to happily commit to illustrating two more scenarios and a series of general illustrations for the book. The plan is to have the project done by 11/11/2018. I expect to have my parts done well before that.
At about the same time Oscar Rios of Golden Goblin Press let me know that things were a go for Cathulhu Kickstarter. That campaign ran from June 29th to July 29th and successfully overfunded. One of the successfully met stretch goals was to have a PDF of the illustrated edition of Tails of Terror available for October. That meant I needed to complete sixteen illustrations in August.
I turned in the last one this morning.
I’ve got lots of work yet to complete on both projects but I thought I’d take a moment to breathe and update this website. Cheers y’all!
King Mantis and the Red Dragon
King Mantis stands about twenty feet tall. That makes the critter that it is sitting upon … much, much larger.
Making Another Face
According to Wikipedia: The Face first appeared in the Columbia Comics omnibus title Big Shot Comics #1 (May 1940) and continued until issue #62 (January 1946). The Face is radio announcer Tony Trent, who decides to fight crime after having witnessed a murder committed by gangsters disguised as cops. Having no innate superpowers, he instead uses a frightful mask to scare criminals, not unlike Batman. With issue #63, he no longer wears the mask and fights crime as himself until Big Shot #104, the last issue of the series.
Assuming that The Face appeared in every issue, that means there were at least 62 stories about the character. I find that mystifying. And therefore fascinating. I did an illustration a while back that featured The Face. I took some liberties with the character’s design and made his mask uglier than its original design. I took liberties again with this new version.
Look Ma! No Hands!
I drew this image earlier this year for a birthday card for my big sister. She’s taking college courses on being a professional chef. She’s not interested in working as a chef. She loves to learn and loves to cook and so she’s having a great, if exhausting, time.
This image was the first time I tried making a gif. I’ve always enjoyed seeing other people’s art processes. Showing that process as a gif makes the evolution of a picture, from rough sketch to final art, look sort of magic.
Two Hundred Years Young
Frankenstein or A Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley was published in 1818 – two hundred years ago. I have great affection for Victor’s poor creation. All he wanted was to be loved. All he got was rejection and hatred. Of course he was cranky.
In the novel Shelley mostly skirts over Frankenstein’s process for creating his creature. Here’s a gif of my process of creating this portrait of the poor guy. 
Mary, Victor and Adam
I was in our local library picking up some holds when I spotted Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel on the new arrivals shelf. I’m fascinated by Frankenstein, both the novel and the various sequels and reinterpretations of the story and its characters. I recently did a search for Frankenstein books on Amazon to see how many versions of the tale were out there and got a result twenty pages long. That’s over 300 books. An awful lot of those listings were for different editions of the original novel. That’s not surprising. The book has been in public domain for over a century and this year is the 200th anniversary of its first publication. I compiled a wishlist of a few of the more interesting versions of the original and as many sequels/adaptations/whathaveyous as I could winnow out. I’m sure the final list is incomplete. I doubt that I will get around to reading most of the books on the list. That would require more time and money than I’m willing to invest.
Pride and Prometheus, however, was just sitting on a shelf in front of me. I didn’t bother resisting.
The book is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice and an alternate version of Frankenstein. The story takes place a few years after the events of Pride and centers around the relationships between Mary Bennet, Victor Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s creation. The events mostly take place during Frankenstein’s time in the British Isles when he was collecting ingredients for (and putting off actually building) a mate for his creation.
I enjoyed it. It’s a sad story. All the best versions of Frankenstein are. The myth of Frankenstein is a tale of a mad scientist who creates a brute who goes on a rampage. The actual novel is about an irresponsible parent. Frankenstein creates a being and then refuses to care for it. He’s not an evil man. He’s a self centered one. His creation is smart and sensitive and rejected by all who meet him. He does bad things out of childish anger. In Pride and Prometheus, Kessel gives us alternating first person narrations by both Frankenstein and his creation. Mary Bennet (her sections told in third person) finds herself caught between the two and tries to help them find peace and common ground. Does she succeed?
As a fan of Frankenstein, I enjoyed this book. I don’t know how well it will read to Pride fans. I haven’t read that novel. I’ve seen both the 2005 film and the 1995 television miniseries. I understand that both adaptations of pretty faithful, certainly more faithful than any filmed version of Frankenstein. Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy are only background characters. Mary and Kitty, the unmarried sisters, get center stage here. At 32 and 30 they are both facing the prospect of becoming “old maids” and neither likes the idea. Mary gets the book’s focus. She’s more accepting of the idea of spinsterhood but she still dreams of making a connection with an amiable gentleman. A chance encounter with Frankenstein leads her to think that he might be that gentleman.
Recommended.
Pride and Prometheus
