Callaway Golf Clubs Storyboards

This was a series of storyboard panels I did for Callaway Golf Clubs, via the Concept Farm agency.

I don't get the chance to do storyboards very much (the last time I did them was back in 2010, for Estee Lauder), so I really sank my teeth into this job--I love doing storyboards, figuring out how to pace and frame the "story" as effectively as possible.

These boards are for a thirty-second spot, where a bunch of golfers are shocked to see a Big Time Golf Pro walk by, who shows them some new Callaway-brand clubs. The guys ooh and ah, with the spot ending with all of them using the clubs and having lots of fun.

When I do storyboards, I use a sort of hybrid of my standard illustrating style mixed with freehand penciling; they're not necessarily all that pretty to look at but they tell the story, and that's ultimately the most important thing.

Both Callaway and Concept Farm were happy with the panels, as was I--I had a lot of fun. I hope it won't be another year and a half before someone asks me to do a job like this again!

The Girl With The Dragon Jacket

This is just me fooling around with a fashion-y, brightly colored-type thing.

Waking Up With The Lord/Brown Bag Logos

These are two logos I was commissioned to create from my friend, the Reverend Mac Schafer. Mac hosts several different community groups dealing with faith-based topics and whatever else is on people's minds. He had ideas of what he wanted, and then asked me to put them together.

I don't get to do this kind of work much, but I really enjoy it. They require a bit more finesse and clarity than my portraits, so it was a nice change of pace!

The Skull Awaits

I have absolutely no idea the hows or whys of this image, it simply popped into my head one day and so I got it down as best I could. I knew I wanted a spooky guy sitting in the dark, with the outline (inline?) of a skull superimposed over him. So that's what I did.

I also have no idea what "The Skull Awaits" is--a book, a movie? Your guess is as good as mine!

Saul Bass' F For Fake

For better or for worse, I'm still in my Saul Bass phase, and Orson Welles' F For Fake--which is all about trickery and deception--seemed an appropriate subject for this approach. After all, that looks like Orson Welles, but maybe it isn't? And the poster tells us he's in it, but then it says he's not...what's going on here?

Vincent Price

Sometimes I just like to doodle...

Saul Bass' Charley Varrick

I meant to get around this Saul Bass-inspired poster for one of my favorite underrated films, Charley Varrick, but the holidays ate up so much of my time I didn't get to until the first of the new year.

I'm not totally in love with how I executed my final idea, but that's how it goes sometimes. I am totally in love with the overall concept--two men standing by a bag full of money. The blood dripping from it signifies the heap of trouble they find themselves in when they realize they've stolen mob money.

If you've never seen Charley Varrick, I recommend you do so. Its a tough, gritty crime thriller, with a great central performance by Walter Matthau, who could hardly do no wrong in the 1970s.

Saul Bass' Strait Jacket

I have no idea how or why I got the idea to a Saul Bass-inspired poster for the Joan Crawford/William Castle B-horror movie Strait Jacket, of all things--but I did, so here it is!

The original image that popped into my head was an all-white poster with criss-crossed black lines to suggest the tied-up sleeves. But since no one actually wears a strait-jacket in the movie, a giant axe seemed more of a "grabber", so I went with that. The lines came in back in at the end, suggesting even more that things are seriously off-kilter.

Monster PSA: Ornella Muti

As soon as I saw that Netflix Watch Instantly added Flash Gordon to its list of streaming movies, I added it to my queue and hit Play. As a kid, I was totally smitten with Ornella Muti as Ming's daughter, one in a long line of babes from genre movies I saw as a kid that interested me for reasons I couldn't at the time quite comprehend.

So what advice would Ms. Muti give? Well, considering how much trouble she got everyone into by falling in love Flash...

Saul Bass' Before Sunrise

There's a new book out about the work of Saul Bass, one of my all-time favorite movie poster designers, so I got inspired to do my own Bass-esque movie posters. Hardly an original idea, but it really seemed like fun and I wanted to try it!

My first idea was to do a Saul Bass take on Before Sunrise, my all-time favorite movie. While the end result didn't come out quite the way I hoped, I had a lot of fun doing this and I think I want to try some more of these...

Mr. Scratch

Mea culpa: I was so busy with Ace Kilroy, getting a few weeks ahead on my Movie Monday column on my writing blog, working on The Aquaman Shrine, and finishing up an illustration job that it didn't dawn on me until around dinnertime Sunday that I didn't have anything new prepared for today!

I was ready to just skip the whole thing, since I really wasn't inspired to come up with anything. But it bothered me that I haven't missed a week on this blog for over a year and didn't want to start now, so the professional in me kicked in and I whipped up this faux-vintage paperback book cover. Certainly no masterpiece; but sometimes you just have to show up.

Paranoia.

I probably need to stop calling these covers I do faux-vintage paperback book covers because there's nothing about Paranoia. that seems vintage to me, in any form.

I've been wanting to get away from the same tropes I tend to use, looking for something more hand-drawn, more loose, more gritty. This cover is only a few steps in that direction, but I like how it came out and want to try more like this.

I don't know why I added the period at the end of the title; it just looked right to me.

The Village Voice - 11/16/11

I was asked to do the above portrait of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly (no relation) for the cover to the 11/16/11 edition of The Village Voice.

The VV showed me the rough layout they had in mind for the cover; a Russian Constructvist-type thing, and I immediately knew what they were going after, since I'm a big fan of that style. The portrait went through a couple of stages, and as it developed it got looser and rougher, to better convey that DIY feel.

I'm happy to see a piece of mine on a cover like this; I think its beautifully composed and really gets the message across. This is my first piece for The Village Voice, I hope its not my last!

Lilian Bond

I've been so busy the past couple of weeks I haven't had time to think about more complex pieces, but I always want to be working on something, so I whipped up this simple portrait of actress Lilian Bond, whom I'm most familiar with from James Whale's The Old Dark House.

I used to do tons of these straightforward portraits back in the early years, when I was first developing this style, so it was kinda nice to go back to that time with this.

Live @ The Steve Allen Theater

My pal, actor, and all-around good egg Damian Maffei asked me to put together this flyer for the show he's appearing in on Saturday, 11/12: a staged reading of two plays, By Bizarre Hands and Suckerfish.

Even though the deadline was very tight (Damian told me about it on Friday, and the flyer needed to be done on Monday), I had the time of my life putting this together. I love doing pure graphic design pieces like this, where putting all the elements into a pleasing, attractive layout is like working on a puzzle--a really, really fun puzzle.

It only took a couple of hours to put it together, and after some minor tweaks here and there, the final version was ready to go by late Saturday. Damian showed it off on his FB page, and all the participants seemed to be happy. I told Damian that I'd volunteer to do any and all flyers like this in the future, absurdly-tight deadline or no!

San Diego Union Tribune Night & Day Cover

This is the cover to the October 27 edition of Night & Day, the free entertainment magazine that's part of the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper.

This is the second cover I've done for Night & Day, and it was a challenge, to say the least! I submitted a couple of different cover concepts for their "2011 Super Dining Guide" and I did this one last, figuring (hoping?) they wouldn't go for it, because it was so complex and the deadline was very tight. Guess what happened?

Anyway, in between trips to NYC to attend the 2011 NY Comic Con, I worked on this cover panel by panel. I did the easy ones first, to feel like I was on a roll, and then moved onto the more complicated ones.

I was aided immeasurably by my pal and master cosplayer Roxanna Meta, who I figured would have at least some good shots of her and her friends in superhero costumes that I could use as reference. I was right, and that's her at the bottom right, peering out from behind a giant menu. I used a shot of a friend of hers dressed as The Flash, but then reworked it so the anonymous speedster is carrying some yummy take-out.

It was a lot of work, but I'm proud of the final result and that I could stay focused enough to get it all done in time. I enjoy doing these Night & Day covers, I hope there's more in my future.


(BTW, click the graphic to see a larger version)

She, Robot

I took a couple of weeks off from my faux-paperback book covers but they're never gone for long; this one is an icky hybrid of sci-fi and sex book that I'd probably read if it existed.

The Real Ace Kilroy?

Being the writer, not the artist, on a creative project is new for me, and I have to say so far I've been enjoying it. But of course that didn't stop me from doing my own portrait of our creation, Ace Kilroy.

My co-creator Dan O'Connor initially used actor Clint Walker as the model for Ace. Over time Dan's talent took over and he made Ace into his own person, but I went back to Clint as the model for my portrait, which wasn't meant to be anything more than a messy little doodle.

Go read Ace Kilroy!

Welcome to the World of Ace Kilroy!

In lieu of a new illustration this Monday, I'm highlighting a long-gestating project that goes live today: Ace Kilroy!

Ace Kilroy is the creation of artist Dan O'Connor and me; its a brand-new online daily comic strip launching today over on AceKilroy.com!

Ace Kilroy is a project Dan and I have been working on for over a year. He and I attended the Joe Kubert School together, and from the beginning I was impressed by the quality of his work: Dan had a crisp, simple style, dynamic but not flashy--perfect for comic books, and I resented the hell out of him for it!

Anyway, over the intervening decades(!), Dan and I lost touch, and then we ran into one another again virtually on Facebook and then in something called Real Life at the 2009 New York Comic Con. Dan was telling me some horror stories (stories I was all too familiar with in my own life as an artist) about doing comic book work, and I was simultaneously angry and bewildered that a guy this talented has had to deal with some at times shady comic book publishers. Little did I realize, but Ace Kilroy was born on the ride home from the con.

Within a couple of months, I had formulated a basic concept of the strip, what it would be, what kind of tone I was aiming for, and I knew Dan would be the perfect artist to bring it to life: he and I are both aficionados of 30s and 40s culture (Americana specifically), and since Ace Kilroy starts off in 1937 and would steeped in that world, I knew Dan could really sink his artistic teeth into it.

Luckily, he agreed, and within a few weeks we were already working on the strips, having a blast, but with no clear date set when it would officially launch. Since the strip has a prevalent horror theme, I thought October 31--Halloween--would be perfect.

The short of Ace Kilroy is: In 1937, the United States has learned two disturbing facts. One, that supernatural monsters--i.e., vampires, werewolves--are real. Two, the Third Reich, in preparing to start World War II, are trying to take control of these monsters and turn them to the side of the Nazis, making them unstoppable.

President Franklin Roosevelt commissions soldier of fortune, WW I veteran and all-around adventurer Ace Kilroy to head to Transylvania, where there are rumors of some sort of real-life Dracula, and stop whatever nefarious plot is being hatched!

Ace Kilroy will feature adventure, horror, thrills, comedy, political intrigue, and even romance, in (hopefully) the most fun and engaging way possible!


I normally never use my other blogs to pimp my outside projects, but Ace Kilroy is special: I am enormously proud of what we've created so far, and we're going to give it ol' college try in terms of making it a financially viable, ongoing creative project: its nothing less than a daily comic strip, just like the classic adventure strips of old, except Ace Kilroy will appear on the web, not on the back page of a newspaper sandwiched between Ziggy and Mark Trail.

Ace Kilroy will run a black and white strip six days a week, with an extra-sized Color Supplement on Sundays, again like the classic strips of old. Dan and I want to bring back that sense of pure adventuresome fun with the strip, and transport the reader back to a time when the daily adventures of Steve Canyon, Secret Agent X-9, or Dick Tracy were can't-miss, waiting-with-bated-breath-for-the-next-installment affairs for comics fans.

But since the daily newspapers of old are, essentially, gone (the comics pages especially), we're doing it in a very modern way: on the web, with all past strips available with the click of a mouse, with Ace appearing across a wide variety of social media platforms, which will occasionally feature bonus or special side material. Dan and I essentially want to hire ourselves as the artist and writer (respectively) of an daily comic strip...which of course means you!

Not to sound like I'm taking my other blogs hostage or anything, but if we can get enough people to support Ace Kilroy financially, then I can spend more time at home, leaving me the time and ability to subsidize my other, non-profit-generating efforts, like this one. And isn't that what we all want?

So if you're interested in taking a look at Ace Kilroy, and maybe even supporting it, you can do so at the following places, starting off with the official site, where you can learn more about the characters, the creators, and see the first strip:

...and finally, if you like what you see enough to financially support Ace Kilroy, you can visit the Ace Kilroy Fundraising Page on Kickstarter, where you can learn more about the strip, find out what kind of donations you can make, and even watch a short video all about Ace Kilroy. We hope to raise enough money to give Ace (and us!) and a good running start!

Rod Serling

Thanks to Netflix Watch Instantly, I've been catching up on all the episodes of The Twilight Zone I've never seen before, or haven't seen for a long time. I spent last Saturday working on an illustration project and I just played episode after episode of the show, all day.

This started out as just a portrait of Rod Serling, and then I started playing with it and added some show stills just to jazz it up a bit. Submitted for your approval!