I’m in the process of moving right now which is why I haven’t updated lately. I’ve been digging through some stuff I haven’t seen in years. I literally have boxes upon boxes of crap and swag from comic conventions I’ve done over the years.

Normally I hated doing convention sketches because conventions were stressful enough and I was most likely hungover from the night before. Sometimes however a True Believer could coax artwork out of me by bartering offbeat stuff for a sketch of mine. For instance, one time I got a cool Tarot card which a guy said captured my personality. It’s a load of crap I know but it worked, probably because of the aforementioned hangover.

At a convention in Charlotte N.C. a strange little guy sheepishly handed me an illustrated manuscript of about thirty pages. It was printed on a tan parchment like paper and had no hard stock card cover yet it was obviously professionally printed. There was no indicia with copyright or printing information on the inside or back pages. As an illustrator I always check the bottom of anything with illustrations to see who contributed. There was no identification on it whatsoever. It was quite exquisite! I’d say at the time it was about twenty years old or so.

I felt unnaturally drawn to it so I asked him what he wanted for it. He said he said he wanted a sketch of a naked girl surrounded by fairies. So I compromised and drew him a naked fairy instead. I don’t know if I was lazy and just wanted to draw one figure or that I was a little creeped out by him. He accepted his sketch and handed me the manuscript. I tucked it away in my portfolio and forgot about it until later that night at the Hotel.

I came across the manuscript late that night and started pouring through it. Most of the writing was in an old english font. There were drawings of strange pentagrams with stranger symbols illuminating the entire manuscript. A looming feeling of dread began to well up inside me. Weird drawings of copulating demons and painful rituals jumped off the pages. “Holy shit! This is the real deal” I thought to myself. This was an actual Satanic grimoire. An actual fucking spell book! The Catholic boy in me shit a pickle! There are mystical overtones in my comics so the researcher in me pushed on to see if there was something I could use in it. I read what I could of it but most of it was in a strange Latin-like language.

Finally the fear of the knowledge I was acquiring overcame me and I threw the manuscript into the waste basket by the bathroom. At this point I was scared out of my mind and I didn’t want anything to do with the manuscript anymore. I just wanted it gone. I would figure out what to do with it in the morning. I turned off the lights and went to sleep.

I woke up to a loud noise and fumbled to put on my glasses. The constant drone of the hotel Air conditioner was omnipresent yet the room seemed much colder than it should be. I looked towards the bathroom and to my horror I watched as the manuscript rose slowly out of the waste basket and dropped onto the desk beside it. Since I was in a Hotel for a convention my camera was out and next to my bed. It was before digital cameras so I only had my old Chinon Single Lens Reflex camera from college (which I still have) and took a shot on film. I aimed towards the area next to the waste basket. The chill of terror shook my bones but I managed to get a shot off. Only one shot developed on the entire roll.

Digging through the past I came across this unbelievably creepy photo I don’t even know what happened to the negative. If you are brave enough and have the fortitude to retain the secret knowledge you are about to attain you are welcome to it. You can find the photo right . . .

***!!!HERE!!!***

OK . . . So I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a couple of weeks now.

Picture this if you will . . .

A cold winter morning on the East end of Long Island, or rather; a tiny island off the shore of Montauk. Plumb Island to be exact. A security guard winding down an otherwise uneventful night shift trudges along the rocky shores of the isolated island. Glaring through the dim morning air he comes upon a corpse. A human corpse. A human corpse with “very long fingers” . . . WTF!!

Sounds like the plot of a late night B movie except that it’s true. Did they find a mutated human off of Long Island?

“The body was described as that of a white male about 6-feet tall with a large build and “very long” fingers. According to authorities, there were no obvious signs of trauma.”

Have you ever heard a report of a dead body with it’s fingers as an important attribute. Why would you describe a body as having very long fingers. How long is very long and what does that even mean. Long like his girlfriend was a happy girl or long like . . . Edward Scissorhands long? How did it end up on Plumb Island to begin with when nobody is even allowed on it without government clearance. I wanna know more.

Let me back up a bit, Plumb Island is home to the Plumb Island Animal Disease Center where they have researched strange and dangerous infectious diseases for decades; bringing you Toxic goodness since 1954. So was this poor bugger some escaped mutant experiment or a really bad swimmer in January waters?

Now . . . let’s back up one more year to July 2008. Again, our story begins on a beach at the East end of Long Island; this time it’s the posh haven of East Hampton. Our hero is a young woman. As she walks along a popular east end beach she spots a group of people gathered around something on the sand. As she nudges her way into the scrum of onlookers she snaps an innocent photo of a strange creature. A gnarly little carcass; pink as a baby’s belly with a face that could turn milk . . .  that’s right the “Montauk Monster“. Did I mention the  beach is about a mile or two south of Plumb Island and most of that is open sea.

For the record, I think the Montauk Monster is the rotting remains of some inbred pedigree lap dog. I can almost hear some rich old poon standing on her pretentious east end porch calling for “Pooky” to come home. Well lady last I heard pooky was in someone’s cooler.

As for the Plumb Island mutant. I think it’s one of those Human-Pig hybrids George W. was babbling about in the last days of his eight year failure.

So just remember to watch the skies kiddies and don’t make me school you on “The Montauk Chair“. Nighty Night boys and girls, don’t turn the lights out, especially if you live on Long Island.

So sayeth the immortal Walt Kelly and today it’s never seemed more true!

Republicans are narrow-minded thugs! Democrats are weak-kneed panderers!

And they’re both for sale apparently!

Two wars fighting ghosts and madmen in broken mountain landscapes, rampant conservative fear mongering and vapid personalities judged more for appearance than substance, leave the hollow masses cowering in the darkness of their own paranoia.

“Death Panels!? . . . Really!!?? We really are such a gullible country.

And just today it’s been made into law that corporations have the right to contribute as much as they want to whatever campaign they choose. All under the protection of free speech. . . but you can’t say Shit or fuck on TV. Personally I find unlimited biased campaign contributions far more offensive. Could it be that in a supposed left-leaning government we’ve signed away Democracy itself, or has Democracy reached it’s purest form and Capitalism will decide who leads us. The very corporate giants whose greed nearly brought the world to it’s bloody knees just got the key to the back door of our government. God help us all.

“It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans,” Obama said.

Well I don’t know about all of that, all I know is that I’m on the lookout for my obligatory post-appocalyptic rusty shopping cart for when I have to roam the Earth.

So let’s all make sure we crawl up inside our fears of dark-skinned desert boogeymen . . . but know this, the true fear won’t come from some desert hiding a few rogue sharks, it’ll be right under our noses. and the commercials will tell us all to sleep the whole time.

Where are you when we need you Pogo?

Well at least they’ll probably legalize reefer to make it easier for the lefties to swallow the freight train of corruption coming our way. And sleep we will. I truly hope Obama has a game plan, but I’m beginning to doubt. Then again if the Jets can make it this far in the playoffs, ANYTHING can happen. If they win the Superbowl I’m really getting my rusty shopping cart because the Seventh seal was just broken.

J. . .E. . .T. . .S       JETS!, JETS!!, JETS!!!

Ω

When I started my website I knew virtually no html but through necessity and perseverance I managed to hammer together a functional site that is in a constant state of evolution. When I started TECHNOPHELIA in 1990 it was far too strange to be published by anyone at that time, yet it made it to press, same thing when I started SWEET LUCY in 1991 yet I printed five issues. And so it was with BABY ANGEL X in 1994 and it ended up with a print run of over 9000 on the first issue. This philosophy can be applied to everything in your life. You will find that the bigger the disaster the more you will be forced to dig deeper into your subconscious mind to find creative solutions.

So, don’t believe that little voice of fear you hear when you tread the waters of the unknown. Don’t believe the haters who bash your results and tell you it can’t be done and than cower behind the mundane. Through sheer force of will you can turn opposition into alliance, through sheer force of will you can turn tragedy into triumph and through sheer force of will you can bend the Universe to your desire.

So go out there and DESTROY my children. Trudge through your life like Godzilla through Tokyo. And more often than not, when the screaming stops and the blood and sweat of your toil lay in morbid pools around your feet the dust will settle and you will find that what is left is something beautiful!

I recently saw the movie Zombieland and it got me thinking. The movie suffered from something that most modern zombie films suffer from and that is Zombies cannot run. Zombies . . . true zombies are undead corpses subject to the rapid decay of death. Rigor mortis would certainly set in almost immediately, locking up joints and impeding muscle function. So you see zombies cannot run, except for maybe within the first six hours of death but not for very long after that

In trying to shoehorn zombie fiction into a more modern reality, Hollywood tries to write zombies as mysteriously infected humans with all the mobility of healthy humans and in some cases with enhanced human abilities. That’s fine for a new species of movie monster. It’s just not a true zombie. 28 days later and Zombieland fall into this category. The creatures in these movies should be characterized more as psychotic humans/ escaped mental patient type creatures.

There are several exceptions of the running zombie syndrome that actually work, one being the awesome classic Return of the living dead. Also the remake of Dawn of the Dead pulls off the zombie hustle. The zombies in both of these flicks are without a doubt . . . ZOMBIES!!