Tag Archives: Richard Corben

Skook Words (and Pictures) #28

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Friday stumbles over the horizon, dazed and wobbly. Is today the right day? Is it really Friday? Or has Thursday lingered over, an unwelcome, obstinate guest? Perhaps Saturday has arrived early and will spin Friday around and away for another week?

Nah. That’s Friday alright. Friend to some. Enemy to others. Simply another day of the week in cultures that don’t give the days names.

The Next Five

Last week, over on Facebook, Jason Levine nominated me to post 10 comic book characters that have influenced my interest in comics. One character a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the character.

So I did. I just posted covers on Facebook but here I’m giving a little context to my choices. I wrote about the first five in last Friday’s newsletter. The next five are below:

6. The Spirit


I read the Spirit in black and white reprints published first by Warren Magazines, then Kitchen Sink Press. The stories were original published in color in weekly installments of Sunday newspapers. It’s a brilliant series with a lot of creative storytelling, layouts and design. (And racism. Sigh.) There have been a few attempts to revive the character but none of the new versions have lasted.

7. Modesty Blaise


I spent a lot of time in the library as a kid. I made it a habit to go there regularly and read The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The comics page. I’m sure I read other parts of the paper upon occasion but it was always the comics that I came to read. If I missed a day the library kept copies of the previous week’s issues easily available. The Chronicle ran the daily Modesty Blaise comic strip. The library also had copies of some of the Modesty Blaise novels. I forget which I discovered first.

8. Den


I read the first 15 pages of Den in the trade paperback Ariel in the same little bookstore that I used to visit to get my comics as a kid. The art blew me away. At the time I couldn’t afford the book. Discovering the extended series later in Heavy Metal magazine further warped me and made me a fan of Richard Corben for life.

9. Zot


Zot! was a fun series. A mix of silly and serious. Not much to say beyond that.

10. Shang Chi


I’m not sure which was the first issue of Master of Kung Fu that I purchased. It’s not this one. I picked this one because it features Paul Gulacy’s art. That’s what attracted me to the series to begin with. Doug Moench’s writing kept me engaged until the series was canceled with issue #125.

The Process

Here’s this week’s process GIF –

Subscriptions Delayed

I’d written last week’s newsletter and scheduled it for publication at the usual time. And then I went poking around in WordPress (this site runs on WordPress) to see if I could find the 530 subscribers that my subscription form claimed I had. In the process I did something that removed the emailing function from my posts. I haven’t had time to dig in a figure out exactly what I did. Apologies to anyone who had to come here to read rather than get this newsletter in their email. I will get it fixed.

And, no, I wasn’t able to find the list of 530 subscribers. Maybe my website is hallucinating.

I hope your week goes well. May you experience joy. May you get rest.

See you in seven!

Tuesday Night Party Club #50

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Galleries – Atomic Age Cthulhu

Atomic Age Cthulhu is the last book I illustrated for Chaosium. I did the work in 2012 and the book was published in 2013. It is a collection of adventure scenarios set during the 1950s. I shared the illustration duties with Caleb Cleveland and Marco Morte. There was some miscommunication between the folks at Chaosium who were sending out the assignments so I started some pieces but didn’t finish them because someone else was already doing them. I did maps for the first and, probably the last, time. It was challenging and sort of fun but not something I feel a call to do again.

The three scenarios that are I worked on were –

High Octane – In which Serpent People engage in shenanigans in the Pacific Northwest.

Destroying Paradise, Hawaiian Style – In which an Elvis type singer is targeted by Deep Ones.

Return of Old Reliable – In which a test subject monkey returns from space with a very bad attitude. This scenario was written by Oscar Rios, the future founder of Golden Goblin Press.

There was companion fiction anthology to the scenario book. I was commissioned to illustrate the cover but, for reasons that were not told me, Chaosium chose a different artist to do a new cover and used that instead. Oh well.

Story Seed #99
Start With the End

If you have a hard time starting a story, try beginning with your climactic scene and work your way back. That’s sort of what I did with these story seeds. I started with the hashtag #99stories and despite a delay after the first few (and perhaps some cheating along the way) we’ve arrived at number 99. If I’d planned better I’d have an actual story seed to offer.

Let’s pretend that I did.

Remembrance
Richard Corben

Richard Corben passed away on December 2nd. The image above was a limited editon print he did in 1978. It was the first and,so far, only art print I’ve ever purchased. Sadly, I lost it somewhere in the intervening years. He was one of the illustrators that has most influenced my art. Tributes to him can be found all over the internet right now. I hope to write something longer about his work in 2021. He had a long and impressive artistic run and I’m sad that it has come to an end.

Local News

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This week is my Long Week at USPS. I’ll be working six days in a row. I’ll just do one thing after another until I get to collapse on Sunday.

Last week I was able to finish a Mighty Nizz illustration that had been sitting on my drawing table for over a year. Yes, it was really on my drawing table the entire time. I put other pages of bristol board over and moved it around when necessary but it stayed on the table the entire time. I’d penciled it and started inking it and then got caught up in doing commissioned work.

The space on my drawing table already has more works in progress on it waiting to be tackled. But Christmas and mail first.

Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe. Write letters. Be good to yourself and those around you. See you next week!

Tuesday Night Party Club #2

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Artstuff

One of my nephews (technically my wife’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s son but that’s too long to write every time) asked me to draw him a Tiefling. This was the result.
I’d recently joined a Richard Corben fan group on Facebook and folks there had been posting photos of some of Corben’s original art. That gave me a chance to better look at his techniques. I tried to apply some of those to this drawing.

Story Seeds #26

The last human on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door ...

Actually, that’s the story. I’ve added two letters to it as a modernization. It was originally written by Fredric Brown in the 1940s. His original short story reads –
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door…

He went on to expand this short-short into the story Knock. Brown was a brilliant writer but his work, while often ahead of its time, is also a product of its time. In the 1940s most readers would assume that the last man on earth is a heterosexual, middle class person of European descent. In other words, a straight white guy.

By changing “man” to “human” the possibilities open up as to who is sitting in that room and how they might respond to the person(?) knocking on the door.

I read quite a bit of Brown’s work when I was kid. My favorite was his novel Martians Go Home. The Martians (little green men, of course) come to Earth, not to conquer, but to be as annoying as possible. It’s one of those books I prefer not to read again in case I don’t find it as hilarious as I did when I first read it.

Speaking of Richard Corben, he illustrated a cover for a collection of Fredric Brown short stories so I’ll close with that image – Lifestuff

We – the faithfull letter carriers of the Westwood station – have been warned of an upcoming snowpocalypse since November of last year. Management has passed out tire chains for our vehicles and slip on cleats for our shoes. Seattle rarely gets snow. Because of that we don’t deal with it well. Last year we had a week of it and the mail got backed up something awful.

Often when I deliver in bad weather a customer will quote that “Neither rain nor sleet nor snow…” poem. I will nod and smile. That poem isn’t actually the motto of the post office. It was written at a time before freeways, safety belts and child labor laws. The post office has no official motto. Most of us carriers have the motto – “Deliver the mail, deliver it right and come back home in one piece.” So, during the snow last year, a lot of mail to side streets and hilly neighborhoods didn’t get delivered for a few days. Seattle doesn’t have a lot of snow plows. That means only the main thoroughfares get plowed. USPS mail trucks are not good for adventures. They don’t have a lot of power. They aren’t four-wheel drives. A lot of mail went out, came back, got sorted into the next day’s mail, went out again, came back again, got resorted … But it did get delivered eventually.

Yesterday we actually got a dusting of snow. It started in the morning. I rearranged my route so I delivered the hilly parts early in the day. Snow really only stuck on lawns and shady places, nothing on the roads or sidewalks. I did work 13 hours but that was because of a heavy mail volume (and volunteering to carry part of a route whose carrier called in sick) rather than because of the weather. I’m writing this note in the morning. We did get more snow overnight but the roads appear to be clear.

Weather.com says we’ll have more snow today. I’d ask you to wish me luck but I should be home by the time you read this. I’m not planning to volunteer to carry extra today.

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Last issue I requested that folks subscribe to this newsletter. Unfortunately the instructions I gave were faulty. Anyone following the link from Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook arrives at this specific blog post and there’s no subscription link on the individual blog posts.

To get the subscription link, click on “Home” is menu bar under the site banner. A whole list of links and nonsense will appear on the right. The subscription link will be under the search field at the top.

Thank you for reading! Stay warm! I’ll be back next week.