The Horror Of Party Beach

That's right, everybody! Get ready to do the Zombie Stomp with the way-out Del-Aires, while bearing witness to a strange invasion from the sea by unusual monsters looking for blood!

Anyone who is even remotely tuned in to the goofier (read "joyous") back alleys of popular culture, is probably familiar with this movie. Long story short, actor and industry gadfly Del Tenney decided to try and cash in on the surf culture craze of the early 1960s and the drive-in draw of monster movies at the same time by making a monster-in-the-surf film; not in sunny California where Gidget was shimmying with the Beach Boys, but in the chilly waters of the Atlantic off the New England coast! It was touted as the first horror musical (which is inaccurate because the infamously dull The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies beat it to the punch by months.) The movie has been dismissed as one of the worst movies of all time, and ravaged by everyone from Leonard Maltin to Stephen King, but darn if it isn't fun enough to survive. 

In 1989, Indiana Junk Rock band Sloppy Seconds included an homage to the film on their album Destroyed, and a decade later the movie gained cult film stock points when it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Click to watch trailer for The Horror Of Party Beach.

Great, you might say. That's all neat-o and everything, but what am I doing here, on this blog thingy, reading about it? Well, it just so happens that in 1964, a fumetti-style photo comic of the film was published by Warren Magazines, the gang that gave us Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, and other horror-themed comic titles. This over-sized photo comic essentially breaks the film down into stills, tweaking a few things here and there. For example, in the comic version you can see someone has gone through and painted big scary piranha teeth into the mouths of the monsters. In the actual film, the creature's mouth is full of mollusk-like protuberances that make it look like it's walking around with a mouth full of hot dogs. 

I have a copy this here publication, and thought, since we're dealing with actual horrors and dangerous weather here in the upper Midwest, why not try to bring a little levity and joy into things. Should you be so inclined, the entirety of the The Horror Of Party Beach comic is available for download here, to peruse at your leisure.*

*Note about the files: The magazine was scanned in single page jpeg format. The download is an uncompressed file folder containing the jpegs. 

Ghosting The Waves with The Phantom Surfer!

Howdy from the not-so-Great White North! 

Aside from the usual extreme temperature advisory (we're supposed to have wind chills at or around -35 degrees Farenheit over the next 48 hours), we're also currently under siege by our own government. This isn't a political blog in any way, shape or form – if anything this is my one surcease from the constant barrage of all of that – but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention it. 

The current luau status: unlikely.

Long story short, there's a lot of reasons folks here in Minnesota are staying inside right now. And, of course, what so often happens here during the most brutal depths of the winter months, at least for me, is that I start romanticizing and longing for the warmer days of summer. 

Well, I can't move May closer to January, so the next best thing (I guess) is to try to invoke a sense of the warmer climes with a bit of summer-related ephemera. And today's comes in the form of a haunting surfer story from Ghostly Tales #71, published in January of 1969 by Charlton Comics.

Aside from the obvious signature on the Jim Aparo cover above, there are no credits to be found in this comic. The story in question, " The Phantom Surfer", is clearly illustrated by Steve Ditko. Whether he wrote the script for it as well, I have no idea. 

The story is ok for what it is. It has characters making odd choices and the ending has sort of a fun conclusion (I almost said "twist") that you can predict the second Larry decides to surf out to impersonate the mythical phantom surfer. Ditko's art here is fine. It's not my favorite period of his. I enjoy a lot of his early pre-Marvel work for horror and dark fantasy titles like The Thing and This Magazine Is Haunted, and of course the initial runs of Spider-Man (whom he co-created) and Dr. Strange (whom he created). In my opinion much of his work that followed appears sloppy and amateurish and the characters he created for DC Comics like Hawk & Dove, The Creeper, The Question and Shade, The Changing Man are silly half-baked embodiments of Ditko's worldview or oddly complicated notions rather than competent or interesting comic book characters. 

You can see that my copy is in pretty rough shape. Some of the pages couldn't be scanned straight on because of how deteriorated the spine is, but please do enjoy this spooky, summery surf tale via Steve Ditko and magazine host Mr. L. Dedd. I've included the ads from this particular issue because I thought they might be enjoyed as part of the nostalgia of the reading experience.

Surf's up!

Shark Cautery

 

"Shark Cautery" acrylic on paper

 

Here's most of a recent painting. My scanner trims a little off the edges. Also, my Canon PIXMA scanner has a weird tic where it refuses to identify bright, brilliant colors, so will wash them out. The sort of salmon-y color in fire coming from the shark's mouth is actually a neon red color, but most everything else looks real-to-life (color-wise that is). 

I've always loved those sea monster illustrations in the margins of old nautical maps. This is partially a nod to those.

King Of The Surf

 

"King Of The Surf" ink pen on paper.

Hi there. I figured since I done gone and told the internet that I was opting to not actively engage in social media much any longer, and stated that the place to see whatever I was working on would be this here blog, well...I figured I should probably actually post something. 

First thing's first. The note I posted on my Instagram account (see below) stating that I was choosing to step away from the platform, was in reference to the inundation of "Suggested Post(s)" and thoroughly obnoxious Tik-Tok-esque videos that jam up your content scroll. It was getting to the point where the accounts I was actually following were making up a thin minority of the content I was seeing. 

It's annoying, it's distracting, and with a finite lifespan of unknown duration, it's a detriment to my quality of life. Perhaps that reads much more dramatically than I actually mean it. All of the friends, acquaintances, artists, musicians and other random accounts that I personally chose to follow on the platform, I will still check in periodically to see what they are up to, but I won't be actively posting anything there. At least not for a while.

Besides, I much prefer long-form posting like this, where some substance can be paired with an image, rather than just zine-scrap picture bombing. And keyboard typing is much more my style than fingertip-tapping out hashtags. 

The sketchbook doodle above was an exercise in drawing a complete image from scratch with an idea for inspiration but no reference material in front of me. Just a blank sketchbook and an ink pen. The pen contained dark blue ink, whether or not that translates across the scan or not. The idea was to do something in the vein of the illustrations paired with fiction in the old Men's adventure magazines of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, like MALE, For Men Only, Man's Adventure, All-Man, Stag and other laughably titled publications. Of course I had to put my own spin on it, finding zero interest in just drawing a scowling he-man who is present to improve the world or save the day with the inherent level of his manliness. 

Gods & Monsters 2022

I have been invited to participate in the Otherworldly Arts Collective of Minneapolis's "Gods & Monsters 2022" Halloween art show! An open invitation was placed online and after submitting digital samples of my work, I was chosen to participate. There is a two piece maximum per participating artist, due to space restrictions. The actual show is in October, and I'll post more information regarding that later. 

The two pieces I'm bringing to the show are posted below.

"Tombyard Troubadour" acrylic on gessoed cardboard.

Music plays a large part in my life, and obviously, as a result, is something I draw a lot of inspiration from. "Tombyard Troubadour" is the result of a number of colliding influences. I enjoy country, country western and "hillbilly" music from the 1920s through the early 1970s, and believe it or not, there's a lot of darkness to the genres. Aside from seasonally appropriate novelty tunes like "Tennessee Hill-billy Ghost", which has been cut by Eddie Arnold, Red Foley and others, there are a lot of suicide and murder ballads as well. I had the idea of a sort of guardian ghost musician wandering around a secluded backwoods graveyard, strumming out spooky tunes on a coffin shaped guitar. I wanted something that would fit perfectly on a bubblegum card, a bright, poppy image that would sort of tell a whole story or set the tone for a whole visual world in one image.

"Zombie Surf Punk" acrylic on paper.

I love comics, but one of the biggest missed opportunities in the comic page/panel layout, as far as I'm concerned, is how artists don't do anything with the word and thought balloons aside from plotting out how they're going to position the artwork around them. In the world of the comic cartoons, so much of the page realty is taken up by the dialogue bubbles, that you'd think at some point someone would treat them like a functional part of the reality and incorporate them into the action. That's why my risen-from-the-surf Surf Punk Zombie's speech bubble is draped with seaweed and dripping water. Our undead friend has surfaced, potentially to attend a Circle Jerks show or something, and his words have risen with him, thus they are subject to the same ocean detritus that he is. 

The Otherworldly Arts Collective can be found online at their facebook and Instagram accounts. 

Yetis Don't Surf (But We Think They Should)

Here is today's doodle-a-day effort, which came about as a result of the two rounds of Flapjacks And Sasquatches I played last night, and the Hawaiian shirt I wore when I got off work today. Yes, it's a surfing yeti wearing a party hat (he likes to party), accompanied by a raccoon wearing swimming goggles and tooting a party blowout.

It's just begging to be used for a party invite...or something.

Kong Goes Surfing

Here's another Doodle-A-Day card from yesterday.