I did several projects for arcana between the years of 2008 and 2020. The first created a sort of creature bible for the Asylum film universe, and the second tied together the Arcana comics characters. A “Necronomicon” for their Howard Lovecraft series was unfortunately put on hold, so there is a SIZABLE body of Cthulhu Mythos images I drew for them that have never seen the light of day.
High Times
I worked with High Times magazine in the early 1990’s when I was in art school. As astounding as it might sound to today’s readers, marijuana, or “pot” as it is sometimes called, was actually highly illegal during those backwards, primitive times, but printing and distributing nearly pornographic images of weed was entirely legal. I was doing some volunteer work towards the legalization effort- No, that’s not a euphemism, I was literally stuffing envelopes and marching on Washington for YOUR right to smoke a doob- and the editors saw some of my work and hired me for some of my earliest advertising and editorial work.
These guys contacted me just after my journey to the Hashish markets of Morocco with their epic tale of a Catholic Priest gone Good. Professor Dario Bava is a weed soaked romp involving everything from time travel, nazi werewolves, vampire cults in the paris catacombs, and everything else you can imagine, plus more. The Diabolik crew are excellent folks and, upon inspection of our lives, somehow in my orbit since childhood, only finally colliding as grizzled old stoners. Some things are meant to be!
KITCHEN SINK COMIX
The writer of Flesh Crawlers, Rich Rainey, reached out to KSP with samples of my comic book work. They were very excited to publish this pulpy alien invasion comic and it was one of the flagship books after their merge with Tundra. Later, the first WEIRDLING preview image was seen in their anthology Death Rattle.
MORT Comics
ROD REDUX
Unusual Zombie novel. I ended up redoing most of these illustrations at least once to meet my standards.
STRANGE AEONS
These guys were an upscale Lovecraftean Underground Comix zine for the Heavy Metal magazine crowd. Beyond publisher/collaborators, these guys are friends for life.
Warrant
The Creeps, Vampiress Carmilla
I finally broke down and inquired after my dream job- The type of thing that drew me to the art-form- drawing short, “EC comics” inspired twist ending morality plays for a black and white magazine. Not the most lucrative dream job in funny-books these days, but one must follow one’s muse. I contacted the publisher on the same day I applied for the ERB job and for the same reasons, and was employed by them just as quickly.
