Big Trouble in Little China!

John Carpenter's film BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA is hilarious and fun, and I've been meaning to do a poster for it for some time.  Well, there's a Big Trouble comic coming out by Eric Powell and Brian Churilla today, so I figured I'd mark the occasion by finally putting this thing together.

Happy Star Wars Day

Today is Star Wars Day, so I drew some characters that nobody likes!  Meaning there isn't much art out there for 'em.  Two are from the spine-meltingly bad Star Wars Holiday Special (a musical!) - Trader Saun Dann on the left, and Ackmena on the right.  Played by Art Carney and Bea Arthur.  The middle characters, Noa and his pet/friend Teek, come from the ABC Sunday Night movie Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, which my dad recorded on VHS for me and which I watched endlessly as a six-year old.  Noa was played by Wilford Brimley, who didn't even bother to take his glasses off.

Though these guys were AARPers by the time they played their roles, I figured I'd draw 'em up prequel-era as young, adventure-leaning main characters.  Because if there's one thing I'm good at, it's taking a surefire hit franchise that everyone loves, picking weird supporting characters from it for whom no one has an ounce of interest or affection, and drawing them in a way that renders them unrecognizable from the original.

Lastly comes Jaxxon, a weird green Bugs Bunny analogue used in some of the early Star Wars comics.  I tried to make him look vaguely less bunny-like.

Happy Easter!

THE CREEPS announced, coming in 2015 from Abrams/Amulet

Harry Flashman

Today is the late George MacDonald Fraser's birthday.  He's best known for his Harry Flashman character from the entertaining and (in my mind) educational Flashman Papers series.  I love these books, and his other writings, too, especially his essays on historical film.  Fraser was responsible for influencing my artistic and literary development in a number of ways, but the most pronounced is the consideration of the ethical responsibility one has when handling events of or figures from the past.

So here's a drawing of Harry Flashman to commemorate the occasion!

Five Dashiell Hammet characters

Sam Spade (the Maltese Falcon), The Continental Op (Red Harvest), Nora and Nick Charles, and Asta (the Thin Man).

Theodore Roscoe's Thibaut Corday of the Foreign Legion

I recently discovered the Thibaut Corday stories of Theodore Roscoe through the excellent Altus Press reprint collections (I got 'em via Kindle because I was traveling; hopefully I'll get my hands on the paper copies eventually), and have really enjoyed the ones I've read so far.  High adventure foreign legion yarns.  Lots of fun, and nicely told.

Here's Thibaut Corday!

Sailor Steve Costigan

Here's a picture of Sailor Steve Costigan, a character featured in a bunch of short stories by Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard. While I've never been particularly drawn to his sword and sorcery stuff, these brawler picaresques are exciting and very funny. Think Popeye written by Mark Twain and you'll have a pretty good idea as to the feel of the stuff. 

To my knowledge, there isn't a good collection of them in print, which bums me out, but I got mine via one of those kindle complete works for three bucks packages, so you can read 'em, easy.

Granada TV's A STUDY IN SCARLET 1963

The Granada TV adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories (1984-1994) are many people's favorites, and though no adaptation has entirely satisfied me, they are pretty great.  But the principals were too old by far when the series began (Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes, was 50!) to ever adapt the first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet.  So it's one of the few canon stories to not be filmed with Brett in the lead role.  Which is a shame.

So I figured out what year the story would have needed to have been shot in order to put Brett and Burke near the ages of Holmes and Watson at their initial meeting (taking the more conservative Morley timeline, as the Granada series seems generally pretty conservative in its interpretations), and that would be the early-mid 1960s.  I also figured out who would have been the right age (and at the right stage of their careers to do TV) to play the more prominent supporting roles.  

So, here you go, a poster for the nonexistent 1963 Granada Television production of A Study in Scarlet!

Baldwin IV of Jersusalem

829 years ago today, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem succumbed to the leprosy that had afflicted him since childhood. Despite being almost crippled by his affliction at age sixteen, he personally led a force of only 375 knight into battle against the 26,000 strong Ayyubid army at the battle of Montgisard to total victory, wiping out all but ten percent of Saladin's army (the worst of his rare defeats) and postponing the inevitable siege of Jerusalem for a decade.