Nine years ago Michael Aitch Price scripted a short tragicomic entitled The Revenant and I illustrated it. It was actually created for publication in some long-forgotten ill-fated publication. Over the years it has come dangerously close to actual publication more than once, and just in time for Halloween Michael contacts me and tells me to exhume it once more, publication is imminent. So as long as it's sitting around here stinking up the studio anyway, I'll share a few random panels as we count down to Halloween.
As you can see, just like anyone else I was seduced and mesmerized by the cool tools in Photoshop when I first learned it. I'll go in and rework this thing if it gets published, but for now, gaze upon my feet of clay! Click to embiggen.
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God help me, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" got stuck in my head the other day! It's a crappy song and getting it stuck in my head made me angry on many levels. The preposterousness of Elton John refusing to be locked in your penthouse and going back to his plow made me want to throttle someone with my bare hands. It's a good thing I'm a sensitive weakling and not an ex-Marine biker or I'd probably be in jail by now.
7 comments:
Halloween? What's wrong with "Harvest Day"? I like those cute little smiling pumpkin headed scarecrows with straw for hands. Don't you?
Why can't I comment?
The dogs of society HOWL, Mark! Can you HEAR them???
I kind of like, "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road". I just take for granted that most pop lyrics are inane and that the vocals are just another sound, and this allows me to enjoy a much wider variety of music based on melody alone. Half the time I can't make out what they're saying anyway, and I have to admit, I never bothered to figure out what Elton John was saying in that one. It's only the unbearably obvious songs, the ones where you just can't ignore the obnoxiousness of the lyric, that get on my nerves, like "Candle In The Wind", which grates on my teeth like syrup wrapped in tinfoil. Keep in mind too, that he doesn't write this stuff, he just writes the melodies. Not that you can't tell.
If you care too much about what the lyrics mean, you never will appreciate David Bowie. I just love the sounds of some of those words together, like "Time takes a cigarette, then a finger, then another finger, then cigarette". What in gods name does that mean? Who knows. I just like the way it sounds. But then there's great lines like "like tigers in vaseline" that do reward you with at least a great visual if you're paying attention.
I'm an unabashed minor Neil Diamond fan, and hell if I know what half the stuff he says means. "I am me, I am you..." And so on and so forth. Who cares? The guy has some really complex melodies. I once heard his vocal range described as, "Neil Diamond, and more Neil Diamond". And yes, that's about it, but even such a monotonous instrument when pumped up to full Neil Diamond bombast, Neil Diamond at Eleven--well, it's got a nice beat and you can dance to it.
If you change your mind and decide to become an ex-Marine biker, I can lend you my biker's wallet....
I hate the song. The melody, the whiney voice, all of it. Not just that lyric - that's just iceing on the cake.
I can ignore dumb lyrics in a good song.
I see what you're saying about the photoshop special effects--when I first got photoshop I put gradients on everything, thinking they were magic and would make all my art look better--alas. The art looks good, aside from those obvious photoshopped parts which really don't seem all that bad.
How did you illustrate that? Is it all digitized? Looks like goache.
"Goodbye Yellow Brick Road". I've rarely paid attention to the lyrics, save trying to figure out once what the hail he was saying when someone finally explained some of them to me.
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