The Damned: The Graveyard Chronicles

Well, this is exciting!

A few months ago, Plastic Head Music contacted me, asking if they could use my Bride of Frankenstein illustration for a "punk album" they were putting out. I said sure, not thinking much about it after that. Little did I know that the band was The Damned, a legendary group that has been around since the 70s, and were contemporaries of The Sex Pistols and The Clash!

Not being familiar with them (totally squaresville, Daddy-O), I posted this graphic on my Facebook page, not guessing it would explode with comments from friends who count The Damned as one of their favorite bands, in disbelief that someone they know did the art for one of their albums.

Needless to say, I'm proud of the piece, and how it was used here. Plastic Head was great to deal with, and my only hope is they release this on vinyl so I can see my work all nice and big. I don't think there's a release date yet, but I will definitely announce it once there is.

Universal Monsters: Werewolf of London

Since Halloween is right around the corner, I thought I'd give the faux-vintage paperbacks the week off, and instead put up another installment of my "Universal Monsters" poster series!

I admit, I'm not that big a fan of Werewolf of London--I just find it too talky and dull--but nevertheless it is part of that great Universal series of monster movies from the 1930s. And of course it ended up leading (indirectly) to 1941's The Wolf Man, one of my all-time favorites!

Also, in some ways lead actor Henry Hull's make-up (by Jack Pierce, of course) as the werewolf is just as scary as Lon Chaney Jr.'s was, and it was that powerful image that made me want to add this film to my poster series!

Abbott & Costello Meet The Killer, Boris Karloff

Even though I generally consider this "Universal Monsters" poster series tapped out, every so often I get a hankering to work up another one, and I get really energized to do it if I can find a way to jazz it up a little.

Aside from being a big Abbott & Costello fan, I've always had a soft spot for this particular A&C film, because the title is so weird and ungainly--after all, how many films have one of the actors from the cast listed in the title?

Since this series is monster-centric, focusing on Karloff rocking a very serious look only made sense. Bud & Lou probably deserve a little more poster real estate, but I thought giving them a doubled-inset headshot helped work towards that.

I don't think this one ranks as one of the best of the Universal Monster posters I've done, but it was a lot of fun to work on and I always like adding to the series...

Sandra Lee Halloween 2010

Boo!

A couple of months ago, I was contacted by the people who put together Sandra Lee magazine, asking me if they could use my Universal Monster posters for a special segment that would feature them as decoration at a Halloween-themed dinner party.

I of course said yes, and a week or so ago the issue--a special one-shot simply called Sandra Lee Halloween--hit the newsstands, and I was really blown away by how great everything looked, and how integrated my posters were with the surroundings:

Using eight of my posters in all, the article featured each piece on two pages; one with the poster in its setting, the other with a description of the elements used for the food and the settings. They even used my original logo treatments from the posters to adorn the whole piece!

All told, the article ran eighteen pages, certainly the most amount of space my work has occupied in a magazine!



(Reprinted with permission from Hoffman Media and Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade Magazine. Semihomemademag.com)

Universal Monsters: Dracula's Daughter

I keep telling myself--and everyone else--that I won't do any more of these Universal Monster posters, since I don't want to overdo it and there simply aren't any of those classic monster films left that really energize me creatively.

Yet I can't quite stay away from this format, since its so much fun to plug in the new elements and see what I can come up with. In between some other projects, I realized I already had two key pieces of art--Gloria Holden and Edward Van Sloan--finished (from the Holden Monster PSA poster and the Universal Dracula poster, respectively), so a Dracula's Daughter poster would be almost pure effortless fun.

In the end, I don't think this one quite matches up, quality-wise, to the others in the series, but since neither does the movie, so it all kind of fits.

Universal Monsters: A Trip To Mars

"The Most Fantastic Trip Two Worlds Have Ever Seen!"

Today's entry for Boris Karloff Week is this, the newest of my Universal Monsters poster series. This particular one is my greatest flight of fancy, since A Trip To Mars does not exist.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, A Trip to Mars was announced as James Whale's next film after the triumph of Frankenstein. Not much information about it is known (dozens of movies--some little more than one-sentence ideas--were announced by studios, never to get any further than a press release), but I did read in author John Soister's Of Gods and Monsters book that it was to feature Boris Karloff as a martian, leading some sort of mass revolution on the red planet.

The movie was abandoned, probably mostly because of the enormous cost involved in such a venture. Soon after, Whale and Karloff moved on to The Old Dark House.

So I imagined, what might a Trip to Mars poster look like? Who else might have starred in it, what would the plot have been?

I decided that the film would feature actors that Whale had worked with before (Dwight Frye) and two that we would work with in films soon (Ernest Thesiger and Claude Rains). Rains would be the guy who wants to explore Mars, Thesiger the evil guy who wants to plunder the planet's riches, and Frye would be the weird guy who stows away on the rocket to Mars and basically mucks everything up.

As for Karloff, of course, there are no pics of him in Martian make-up, because the film never got that far. So I had to make up my own...make up, which means I'd have to come up with something as good as Jack Pierce, which of course wasn't going to happen.

So I found a pic of Boris from the 1939 film Tower of London, and went to town on it, adding a goofy Martian third eye, adding and subtracting some facial features, and putting him in a giant, ostentatious, Ming The Merciless-ish outfit.

I decided to add a 1930s-ish rocket, breaking with my normal tradition of not having any other graphics on these posters, because I thought it was too neat not to have on there--plus, since we're talking about a movie that doesn't exist, I thought the poster needed some more iconography to make it as effective as possible.


To learn more about the Boris Karloff Blogathon, click the graphic below to see how other blogs are celebrating the man!

Exhibition at the Miami Beach Cinematheque Part 3

This is the outside of the beautiful Miami Beach Cinematheque, which started its exhibition of some of my Universal Monster posters on Halloween.

MBC also had a live webchat with me before a screening of Frankenstein, where I talked about the posters and answered a few questions, waves of sound emitting from my giant head:

...who dares disturb the great and powerful Rob?!?

Here are some shots of the posters on display. I've never seen them at this large a size (22x30") and framed and lit in such a beautiful manner:

I was really impressed with MBC's presentation and effort they put towards my work, and while I was a bit nervous while doing the webchat, I enjoyed it. Thanks to MBC's Dana Keith for putting it all together!

Exhibition at the Miami Beach Cinematheque Part 2

Just to keep everyone up to date--the exhibition of my Universal Monster posters that's happening at the Miami Beach Cinematheque starting on Halloween night will be kicked off with a live webchat between myself and the MBC, starting around 830pm!

Anyone in the area interested in attending, please check out MBC's site for more details!

Exhibition at the Miami Beach Cinematheque

This is exciting!

There will be an exhibition of my Universal Monster posters at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, kicking off Halloween night, on the event of their Frankenstein/Invisible Man double-feature, and continuing on into November.

This will be the first time my Universal Monster posters will be seen outside my website, and the first time any of my poster work will be seen at the size it was meant to be seen: 22x30" big!

You can find out more about the screenings and the exhibition here: Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. Future updates about the exhibition will appear here!

Universal Monsters: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Eh, I just can't stop with these "Universal Monsters" posters , even when it isn't a "Universal Monster"!

As a fan of those Universal Monster movies from the 30s and 40s, it always sorta bugged me that Universal never did a version of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, the one classic literary monster that's on the same par with Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, etc.

I guess that's because MGM did a a version in 1931 (which is the one reflected here--it even won Frederic March an Oscar for his performance) and then did another one (with Spencer Tracy, less well-received) in 1941, so maybe Universal never felt like they had enough time to make a mark with their own version.

In any case, I felt like it would be fun to graft the 1931 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde into the Universal Monsters poster framework I had built, as if at some point down the line they got the rights to it and released with the rest of their classic monster movies.

I debated for a while how to portray the Jekyll/Hyde persona--have them both as the main monster? When I realized that would make things way too crowded, I decided the obviously right way to do it was focus on the monster--Hyde--and have Jekyll as a co-star, even if March spends way more time being Jekyll than Hyde in the film.

Like I mentioned before, I'm always a little concerned about watering down my collection of Classic Monster Posters, because they are by far the most popular work I have done, and I don't like to add one to the roster if I don't think its as good as the rest--but I think this one came out really well, and I'm happy to add it to the collection.

Universal Monsters: It Came From Outer Space

Embarking on another one of my "Universal Monsters" posters is always fraught with a self-imposed set of expectations.

They are by far the most popular illustrations on my site, so if I decide to try and add another one to the series, I'm hoping that it measures up to the others. It would weaken the whole effort if there were a couple that weren't so good.

Of course, if the end result came out really bad, no one but me would ever see it, but from my experience that doesn't seem to happen. No, the ones in the series I don't think have measured up have just missed--they're not truly bad, but they are a missing a certain something that keeps me from adding them to the official roster.

But overall, I'm pretty happy with this one, a poster for the 1953 classic It Came From Outer Space. It presented a different challenge than the rest of them because the "It" in question is not seen that much in the movie, and not at all on the original posters. Seeing a full on, clear shot of the alien would really ruin the effect, so I went for a similar approach the original Universal art department did--you see the one giant, creepy eye, but all the other details are hard to make out.

This poster is a bit more crammed with stuff than the usual approach, but I thought it worked with all the crazy colors.

Speaking of colors, I decided when I moved onto the 1950s era, sci-fi Universal films, the posters would be in color, as opposed to the monochromatic look for the 30s and 40s monster ones. So I had to continue that here, and overall I'm pretty happy with the results.

Universal Monsters: Jack Pierce

Every time I finish up a new "Universal Monsters" poster, I promise that it will be the last one I ever do, because I always feel like I've exhausted every possible subject.

But, inevitably, I come up with yet another idea for one, and the lure of continuing what is by far my most popular work is too strong to deny. So I open a new folder, and start working...

This one is a bit of a departure, since its for a film that doesn't exist. After watching an excellent documentary on Universal's #1 make-up man Jack Pierce on a DVD re-release of The Mummy, I realized that I would love to see a full-length, movie-sized documentary on the man that created the iconic look for almost every single movie monster, as widely-known today as they were 75 years ago.

So I came up with a cast of movie titans that might want to talk about Pierce's work, like Guillermo Del Toro, Rick Baker, Peter Jackson, plus archival footage of Boris Karloff, James Whale, and of course Pierce himself (who tragically died, nearly forgotten, in the 60s).

My original title was Man of a Thousand Faces, but my pal Pierre Fournier (of the great blog Frankensteinia) suggested that Pierce deserved his own title, not a gloss of the one attached to Lon Chaney.

Pierre was right, so I went for a more exploitative, fun title, and I think its much better. Thanks Pierre!

Oh, one last thing--this time, I promise I will not be promising this will be the last new Universal Movie Monster poster I'm going to do. That's because, in between doing I've Created A Monster! and posting it here, I've already completed another one, which will show up here soon.

I can't help myself!

Frankenstein Meets Shirley Temple

A couple of weeks ago, on the superb blog Frankensteinia, my friend Pierre posted a few pages of a comic book sequence called "Frankenstein Meets Shirley Temple", by cartoonist Roger Langridge.

Something about that inspired an idea in me--what if the Universal Frankenstein movie series had devolved so badly by the mid-40s that they decided to try and pair up their #1 monster with America's Sweetheart? I think it might go something like...

I knew having little Shirley Temple in the same visual space as Frankenstein would look so goofy and wrong that I wouldn't need much else to sell it--a couple of standard monster movie props, plus an absurd plot description...done and done!

I sent it to Pierre, and he liked it so much that he wrote a whole post about my Frankenstein work:

Frankensteinia is such a good, well-written site, that I'm enormously proud that my work has appeared on it, and that Pierre said such nice things about me and my work.

And he's right--Frankenstein Meets Shirley Temple is by far the silliest poster I have yet to work on.

But who knows what the future holds?