Quick collage put together whilst listening to The Avengers radio series, available to stream or download at Avengers Declassified. I do love my French female singers. Here's a portrait of the wonderful Marie Laforêt. Finally, a cover design for legendary British Sci-Fi magazine, New Worlds #223, imagined for Whitechapel'sRemake/Remodel thread.
My thanks go out to Mark Kardwell for informing me that my Doctor Who Tumblr site Ancient and Forever was featured in today's The Guardian Guide. With an average daily circulation of 280,000 and a link from their website it'll be interesting to see how many extra visitors the blog picks up. At the moment the record number of visits in one day stands at 2,232 when this little beauty was picked up by one of the Tumblr staff and posted in the Radar section.
For shame, I haven't posted anything here for over a week, so let's catch up on some recently completed projects shall we.
A couple of weeks ago I featured a selection of re-designed Superman covers from Warren Ellis' Whitechapel forum. I love these kind of projects but rarely find the time to contribute. But when I found out that the next challenge was to re-design 2000AD #1 I just had to chip in. Here's what I came up with:
Although I'm pleased with the general look of the typography and the metallic finish, the fact that I failed to come up with a decent central image somewhat lets the side down. You can see the some of the more successful entries here.
As I was putting it together I was reminded of this 2000AD cover by Brendan McCarthy. I believe it accompanied an Alan Moore future shock which was a Hitchhikers Guide parody. It's amusing to see that 1981's vision of the future still comes with play/record buttons.
The following week's challenge was to re-design Amazing Fantasy#15. When it comes to something as iconic as Spider-Man's debut, you've got you work cut out not to refer to it in someway. The book's title immediately suggested a 1950's pulp magazine style, an idea that seemed to be popular amongst the other entries. The Pulp Fiction Flickr pool proved invaluable when it came to reference. As you can see below I pieced the artwork together from various sources.
Getting involved with the Whitechapel challenges forced me to sideline my submission to Brendan Tobin and Pedro Delgado's, March MODOK Madness, a month-long celebration of the much ridiculed Jack Kirby creation. I'd actually started this back in February and had been puttering about with it for nearly a month before a sedate Sunday afternoon allowed me to complete it before April set in.
And finally, I created this montage to celebrate the first Anniversary of Kirby-Vision. It features just some of the fabulous artists who have submitted work to the blog. It was another race against time to get it finished and I eventually posted it three days later than the actual date, but I won't tell anybody if you don't.
Over at the Whitechapel boards, Warren Ellis recently laid down the gauntlet to re-imagine the first issue of Superman. Here's a sample of some of best. Be sure to check out the rest here.
A fake house ad for a fake Jack Kirby comic which I created for an interview about Kirby-Vision for Tim Miner's Marvel Smartass! blog. Read all about it here.
Premiering on March 12th at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas, The People vs. George Lucas explores the often conflicted dynamic between Lucas and his fans. I'm looking forward to seeing this, but what's even more exciting is the fact that my first Star Wars: Uncut animation in the opening and closing montages of the trailer.
Here's my third and final submission to the Star Wars: Uncut project, this time in the style of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. I've been planning on trying out Gilliam's style for a while now and this scene (taken from the Leia hologram sequence) was visually quite straight forward which allowed me to take it out of context and drop in a couple of silly gags. All of the images used were culled from various sites (see links below) and the vinyl crackle and yawn were sourced, again, from Soundsnap. There's minimal animation, so it was a lot quicker to put together than my previous submissions. Great fun though, I'm raring to try this style out on some other ideas.
Here's my second submission to Star Wars: Uncut project, inspired by The Beatles film, Yellow Submarine, directed by George Dunning. It was great fun to re-design the characters in the style of the film, especially Chewbacca in the part of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. There's a bit more movement in the figures as opposed to my last submission, but I've yet to graduate to any fully-fledged acrobatics. All of the interiors and backgrounds are taken from the film and 're-imaging' in Photoshop and the whole thing was put together in Flash. Sound effects where obtained from the rather marvellous Soundsnap.com and the voices where provided by myself (with apologies to any Liverpudlians out there wondering why the cast have Birmingham accents!). Not sure just yet if I'll take on another scene, but I have a few ideas on how I'd like to render it, so watch this space.
