Good scenes

This is the best scene from a tv movie called “Woman In Black”,, which was a Susan Hill novel. But it is a SPOILER!!! The whole film is on Youtube, but not very good quality. Universal is not allowing it to ever be shown on tv again or be released on DVD. Why in the world would they decide to keep it away from people. It’s a decent film, I wouldn’t urge you to watch it or anything.
I recently saw Martyrs, I had mixed feelings about it but the only thing I really loved in it was that wild woman, That was actually surprisingly scary. I just wish the whole film was supposed to be scary. I’m still a bit angry at the lack of films that even try to be scary, it seems so obvious to me that there should be horror films that try to be scary. I’ve encountered so many people who are too scared to watch horror films, I envy those expectations they have.
I think the whole “unpleasant and thought provoking” movement is not nearly as intelligent as people convince/lie themselves that it is. I dare you to scare me, stop trying to find a way to convince the literary crowd that your horror stories have some political “relevance”.
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Just over a year ago, before I got my job, I felt like I could really bite into an atmosphere in any given place/room/time as if I could taste and smell it. The autumn of 2007 had a really vivid flavour and I haven’t felt anything like that in the last year. Every season used to have this strong feeling about it which would grow over time and become exaggerated in the memory.
I’m a bit worried I’m losing some sensory sensitivity. I used to be able to walk into a place and really relish the atmosphere, maybe I’ve just got bored of my surroundings or maybe the fascination with these things just comes and goes at certain points in your life.
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I used to be of the opinion that comics should be a small cult thing that could be further “ruined” by the masses if the masses started liking them. Then I changed to think that comics should be for everyone,, as big as any other medium and therefore there would still be 90% trash, but the 10% of good comics would expand along with the expansion of trash.
Now I’m starting to wish the medium just died and it would be a tiny niche of people who really NEEDED to express themselves that way.
All the comics I see look like they don’t really truly need to be doing this, they just cant find a better way to make a living. I don’t want to insult these people, I truly want to help them now. I think if everyone was shown the more amazing ends of what can be achieved, they would start wanting to be something amazing.
I don’t mean to ass kiss, but Monster Brains and various other art blogs and all the great music has shown me the light, I would’ve been a much lesser artist if I hadn’t looked at these things. You only go for the good things when you have seen them and know they really exist.
I want to be like a motivational speaker who shows people what they can achieve if they pull themselves out of the muck and aim for the sky.

But part of me feels a little sad that a lot of these movies and comics don’t have the same power over me that they used to,,, but it’s actually a beautiful thing, it makes us want to find something more powerful and even create something great. All my disappointments turn into motivation. People often complain that humans are never content with what we have,, but I think that dissatisfaction is one of our greatest qualities,,, you’ve heard me say this stuff again and again and again,, but I feel like I need to refine the argument and drum it in. Prepare to hear me repeat this stuff again and again, but hopefully in a more inspiring way each time.

I think I could really make people hate me for all my preaching, because in the comic shops I just want to go up to people and say “Do you really really want this? Why do you want this? Will it really make you happy?”,, the fanboy reaction to this could be really hostile, because most of them have convinced themselves over decades that they really do need Star Wars toys and all sorts of merchandise that I think has no real artistic value.
It was painful when I realised I how much crap I had spent hundreds of pounds on, but it had to happen or else I’d be one of those collectors who ends up believing that he really is getting his moneys worth.
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There is a music journalist called Mick Mercer and he writes a series of books on goth music and I bought his 1997 book the other day,, he is really funny and sometimes a bit rude about bands and fans he doesn’t like. But there were two really interesting things about the book. One thing was that in 1997, that he was saying that the “real” goth had not even begun yet, and his books were part of an effort to help the genre push in more ambitious directions. Everyone has an idealised version or versions of their favourite genres and subcultures, but I thought it was odd that he had a vision of an ideal future version of goth. I wish more people would dress like characters in Cabinet of Dr Caligari and less of the leather and hair dye((( a little bit of that is fine here and there))). More church organs and ghostly choirs I say!
The other bizarre thing was that how much exhaustive info there was. There was a worldwide list of bands, people, clubs, shops and all sorts of cult societies. He was disinterested in all the pagan, fetish and vampire cults, but he included them because they asked for it. The interesting thing is that I used to see lots of odd looking people and shops when I went to town around 1990-2004,, and it all disappeared. The obvious explanation is that all the shops moved to the internet and all the people stay on the internet chatting, only coming out at night to go to obscure clubs. But that doesent explain why I NEVER ever see any odd looking people anymore at all. It’s almost scary,, you used to be guaranteed to see atleast one person dressed like a freak, it’s as if someone has killed them all. You still get your standard looking metalheads, but you never see anyone who looks really extreme or “out there” anymore.
You must have read or heard atleast one sci-fi story where all the outsiders are being picked off the streets by some sinister organisation.
That book proves to me that there was lots of those people going around, I wasn’t imagining it. Where did they all go?
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Some nice art in Monster Club by John Bolton...

Dungeon Degenerates

I'm working on a new series called Dungeon Degenerates. I'm using monsters from Dungeons & Dragons & similar games. Somewhat in relation to my previous post about maintaining the funk & fuzziness & mystery in our cultural output, i am so bored by the current style (which has really been going for almost 20 years or so) of Dungeons & Dragons art. Even when they were still using actual paint as opposed to photoshop to render these worlds, there has been a decidedly inhuman, overly-rendered, muted color, overly distorted & over-all gay feeling to all of it. While i think i like Arthur Rakham's work & even the work of his copiers like Brian Froud, within his style are the seeds of this infestation. The seeds of nutlessness. If you want to see an ideal form of RPG art, check out Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader, 1st Edition.

Grell
The grell levitates through the dank corridors of the dungeon hoping to paralyze its prey with the poisonous spines on its ten tentacles. The Grell's powerful beak can crack open its victim's skull so that it may feast on brains.
They enjoy above all else, a potion made from crack & LSD.

Bullywog
A batrachian race of bipedal monsters which inhabit wet places - rainy forests, marshes, damp caves or virtually any other place which is shady or dark and has water nearby, for bullywugs need to dampen their skins from time to time.
The Bullywog is the favorite food of the Umber Hulk.

Laser Printers

Hey EBD’ers. I hope everyone is having a pleasant and safe summer so far. All the recent posts have been excellent…

Anyhow…I could use a little insight. I’m looking to buy a quality b&w laser printer. I’m hoping to get a 1200 x 1200 dpi. What I really need it for is to print black & white art and graphics, including some intricate line art. And I’m not terribly concerned with the printing speed. I was thinking HP. But after reading some reviews, what concerns me is that the newest models are very flawed. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

~~~Marc

new ink "Remus 4 the Coordinator"

Post Apocalypse Abomination!

Illustration for Juice Magazine

Liquid Television

The assignment was to redesign the title sequence for MTV's Liquid Television. Took me two weeks to draw and animate in flash.

I was a big fan of this series, which aired under a different name in Australia and Asia... The show was my first exposure to many of my favorite cartoonists, Mark Beyer and Drew Friedman among others.

From the Past Comes the Future

From my blog "The Goblin".

One of the more unfortunate elements of living in such materialistic times is the general non-understanding of what actual quality of life is about. When the majority of the culture is transmitted by quasi-demonic entities in the mass media whose first job is to control your mind & your time & whose second job is to sell you things, the culture is pretty bad off. Lots of things end up sliding through the cracks & with discipline & vision, one is able to piece something together that actually resembles how we'd like things to be. As a kid, you piece together your own culture with whatever is out there. I was always obsessed with swords & sorcery & even better, when swords & sorcery entered into the post-apocalyptic world, which gave me hope that one day, i'd be able to actually live in such a world.
There is this huge emphasis placed on visual quality & slickness which i find to be so disgusting & obnoxious. What is the point of polishing a turd? It's still a turd, no matter how many pixels it is rendered into, or how shiny & 3-dimensional its soundtrack is. However, a tiny little demon figure, sculpted by some anonymous person & sold on the cheap, or even better, bought in an enormous bag at a used toy store resonates so powerfully with me, as it was a focal point for my mighty imagination.

When all dimensions have been rendered, where is the place for the imagination, for the unknown & for further exploration? When everything is explained, where is the room to move? If all the holes have been filled in, how do we escape from the controlled reality?
This isn't an argument for rawness or unpolished facades as a means to an end, this is about understanding what the actual potential for cultural artifacts is about, as opposed to not being able to see beyond the veneer of the thing. All cultural artifacts should be keys to larger, more meaningful areas of existence, not just pretty things or wastes of time.
I have maintained a deliberately rough style in order to leave that space for imagination & for the importance of the content & for the inspiration to shine through. When everything is given, what more is there for us to do? This is the same argument i have against government handouts. What lacks in the world should be a motivator, not an impediment. People who want everything handed over to them, things done for them & things overly explained are vampiric monsters.
Doing more with less is another key lesson in all of this. Limitations bring the best out in us, as long as we do not resent the limitations. If you don't even understand the idea of limitations, the better you are off. Resentment makes you into a little bitch.
You will find that when people are presented with unlimited choice, they tend to make bad decisions.
More about Fairlight here, including MP3s of the songs.

Devil Doll

Hello, it’s my 23rd birthday today and I have a number of things I want to show you, but I don’t want to overload this page, so I’ll save some things for later.
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Many times I have talked of the virtues of the first four series of Monster in My Pocket and Mighty Max toys, how they were an important part in finding myself in childhood and then finding myself again at the end of my teen years.
I saw a programme a while ago about toys that said that most little girls when left alone in a room with boys toys and girls toys,,, they tend to play with the boys toys. The programme also said that the toy companies know this, but have a stubborn old fashioned attitude and want to keep forcing the traditional girl toys centred around fashion, make up, pets, animals, housewife duties and bringing up children.

But the weird thing is that all these girls’ toy franchises outlive the boys toy franchises and I deeply resent that. Polly Pocket outlived Mighty Max by several years, and more recently I seen it happen again, when Monster in my Pocket was revived in 2006 with the mythology/folklore/legend theme of the first four series, it died very quickly. But the various girls versions based around cute animals were launched at the same time and are selling well to this day, selling in all sorts of shops you can find anywhere, when Monster in My Pocket was restricted to ONE store called Woolworths((which has fallen on hard times)).
How do these girls toys sell so well if they are not remembered or enthused about later in life? I have a feeling that little girls are more persuasive and some of them can raise more hell than little boys if they don’t get what they want. Does that sound real? I just think of all the girls I used to see who demanded to have every Barbie accessory and then didn’t give a toss about Barbie in a years time. Boys toys don’t make the same impression on everyone and a lot of them are not imaginative at all, but there are certainly a few that are really celebrated.

Perhaps these boys’ toys don’t last because there are videogames and Games Workshop/Warhammer to fill those monster loving needs. But a lot of girls play these games too and I’ve noticed girls getting more geeky in the last 10 years((in good ways and bad ways)) mostly centred around Japanese things. (((Completely unrelated: Did you know that more than half of the people who create violent gore torture porn Japanese comics are women? I don’t know why I was surprised, because there is a very visible community of girls who like drawing and reading that on the internet. It’s just that these are usually called misogynistic))).

Anyway, I’ve been reading about mythical monsters in the last few weeks more than I ever have, been buying lots of books about it and it’s a lot of fun, I’ll make a list of books for you guys some time later. My favourites are Nuckelavee, Dullahan, Banshees, Bogeyman, Bloody Bones, Jenny Greenteeth, Cerebus, Ghouls and Minotaur. My favourites are often something to do with the countryside I live in and what feels like it could come around the corner,, almost like inherited fears and memories of the countryside. So a lot of the are of Scottish/Irish/Celtic legend.


Here is the complete(?) and extremely rare card art for the first three series of Monster In My Pocket, many of which were supposed to be in the third series but never got released as toys. I like the crudeness of the art...
Card Art

Best Gallery of the first four series of toys

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Along with Andrzej Masianis, my other most favourite artist I’ve discovered on Monster Brains is Albin Brunovsky. I just bought “Albin Brunovsky Complete Graphic Work 1960- 1997”, it cost me just under 100 pounds((including posting and packaging from a Slovakian store, sadly the only place you can buy the book from.)) but it was more than worth it.
The book does not have everything, so when it says “Complete” it refers to a certain type of work he was doing, unfortunately it only has one small black and white photo of his seemingly very few paintings, some cool photos of his stage design, and it does not feature all his children’s book art. But what it does have is Hundreds of his amazing drawings and some photos and interviews with him.
It is a shame that there are so few places to buy this book from, I emailed this shop...
Slovakian shop
...and a guy set up paypal for me over emails and I bought it from him. The only other book option is a 1990 book which is far easier to find and much cheaper, but Brunovksy did his best work in the last 15 years of his life((it can be done, what an inspiration)) , so the 1990 book misses out on a lot of amazing work.

Here are some scans I made...









Here is some childrens book art not included in the book...
Book Art
Here is Monster Brains gallery links...
3 Monster Brains Links
Here is a 4 page gallery not linked to from Monster Brains...
4 Pages
Here is another shop option...
Brunovskys Son's Shop

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The Silent Hill soundtracks you can buy, are never the full music tracks that you hear in the games, they usually want to fit it all into one disc and compress all the best moments into one hectic nightmare without a lot of the eerie calm you will hear when playing the game, and while I think the “compressed” soundtracks are possibly better, a few of the tunes do suffer from being crammed in and mixed with the others. Here is what I think is the best one from Silent Hill 1 in it’s much better full length glory...

...On the cd you can buy in shops, this is very different and not as good,, Konami should eventually release the full soundtracks on cd, but in the time being, the person who uploaded to Youtube this has the complete full length music to every game in the series, including several different versions and lots of unreleased stuff.

WHY DID WE GET REPORTED AS A SPAM BLOG?

NOW IN COLOR.

NO SPAM HERE. Maybe it's the all-caps. Wouldn't it be amazing if all of the arguing on our posts was actually generated by spam-bots? WHOAH!

Emilio Garcia's "Jumping Brain" process of making a toy

More detailed pictures can be found in this flickr set by the artist.

Found here.

Galleries With Entry Fees

I don't know about you but I'm getting sick of these constant emails from galleries pushing scam entry fees. Just the other day I got one from APW Gallery. They have a website here. The following is the bulk of the message... And don't ask me why they're having a group show on Halloween but chose the theme to be "About U" makes as much sense as sending them 50 dollars for an entry fee.

"Halloween Online Contest

"ABOUT U"

Spots Available: 99

AWARD: Solo Exhibition

SIGN UP NOW!!!

Important Date: Sign up by : Oct 25 2009
Deadline for your artworks : Oct 25 2009
Online Contest Starts on HALLOWEEN!!!

Idea: Each artist can submit up to 10 images of your artworks, It can be photograph, computer illustration or photo of your artwork.There is no limit of amount of works you can submit. This Contest is open to any type of artist.

All Images submitted to us will be up online.

Theme: ABOUT U

This exhibition is not limited to NYC artist. Any artist around the world can participate in this exhibition .

$50 entry fee (Includes 10 images)


Rules:

-Entry fee is non-refundable.

Size Requirement:

500 pixel x 500 pixel

Format: Jpeg

After you complete the entry fee, please e-mail us your images at info@apwarts.com

Subject: ABOUT U CONTEST

*All of our projects are first come first serve,it can be full before the deadline.*

If you never participate in our projects, here are some answers to questions you might have.

1.How do I participate?

All you have to do is fill out the form on the
bottom and it will bring you to a page to pay
for the entry fee securely online. After you complete
the transaction, you will receive a receipt in your
e-mail to confirm your payment from Google Checkout.

2.What kind of payment method do we accept?

We accept all major credit card through Google checkout."

What really pisses me off is they charge artists 50 dollars, non refundable of course, and all the rejected works get put on their website. I can't imagine sending a gallery 50 dollars to show my art, never mind on top of that, knowing that it might go on to be rejected and only shown on their website! And I noticed this website also offers "membership" for a fee of course.

"Fee: $12.95 for 1 month | $62.12 for 6 months(20% off) | $93.24 for 12 months(40% off)

What you will get:

Each artist will have an image on our artist page linking to your personal page on our website.

Discount: When you become our member, you will receive 10% off anything your purchase from us, including entry fee to exhibition and products from our online shop.

Exhibition Discount: When you participate in 4 exhibitions within 1 year, you will get to participate in one of our group exhibition for free."


Isn't that awesome of them to let you participate in a group show for FREE after paying for 4 of them AND paying for a membership!? It's unfortunate how many desperate artists out there fall into this sort of thing and waste who knows how much money on it.

The walled city of Salsiccia

Here's the underground bit. It's a bit absurd at this size, make sure to click on it for a bigger version. This is for a gazetteer i'm working on.

New Picture, New Blog

CARBON MARROW

food chain

A new duo from my Cthulhu series.



On related note, I recently watched "Cthulhu" by Dan Gildark. While it's not a perfect movie, it's definitely one of the better Lovecraft adaptations. It differs from most others in that the monsters play a very subtle role in the movie. They hardly appear at all, and when they do it's more weird than frightening. The movie features great cinematography and a rather Lynchian atmosphere. Also the gay angle was a refreshing theme for a mythos story.

Flier for the Underlings & co.

A flier i did for my friend Ed's band The Underlings. They're pretty damn good. Ed is a great song-writer. The other chaps in the band seem like cool dudes as well. We're talking about me doing their 7" cover.

Inspiration

Fafnir the Dragon

In Norse mythology, Fáfnir (Old Norse and Icelandic) or Frænir was a son of the dwarf king Hreidmar and brother of Regin and Ótr. In the Volsunga saga, Fáfnir was a dwarf gifted with a powerful arm and fearless soul. He guarded his father's house of glittering gold and flashing gems. He was the strongest and most aggressive of the three brothers. After Ótr was killed by Loki, Hreidmar received the cursed gold of Andvari's as repayment for the loss of his son. Fáfnir and Regin then killed their father to get the gold, but Fáfnir decided he wanted it all, turning into a dragon (symbol of greed). Regin then sent his foster-son, Sigurd, to kill the dragon. Sigurd succeeded by digging a pit under the trail Fáfnir used to walk to a stream and plunging his sword Gram into his heart as he walked past. Regin, however, corrupted by the curse on Andvari's gold, planned to kill Sigurd to take the treasure for himself, but Sigurd, having eaten part of Fáfnir's cooked heart, was warned by birds of Regin's attack and ended up killing him.

The dragon from the Nibelungenhalle, designed by artist Hermann Hendrich.