Saturday, September 17, 2011

Smoke Drawing (2011)



Drawn with candle smoke on coated paper.

Rejected Artwork (2010)











These were submitted to childrens/young adult type magazine as samples of my work and they were soundly rejected. I ended up selling some of the originals, so it wasn't a total loss. 


Crooked Fingers (2001) and the New Pornographers (2001) fliers



This is the first flier that I made for the Grog Shop. I still like the image, but am saddened by what an ignorant savage I was at the time. I hadn't quite figured out what "art supplies" were, so this was drawn with Uni-Ball pens and Sharpie on copier paper. At the time, drawing fliers was kind of a lark and I simply used what I had on hand to draw with.

  

This is the first flier I drew for the Beachland Ballroom. As with the above Crooked Fingers flier, it was drawn with Uni-Ball and Sharpie on copier paper. It took about twenty fliers until I made the leap to Micron pens, india ink and Bristol paper. I'm pretty sure I didn't want to invest the money in fancy pens and paper because I am insanely cheap, and like I said, doing fliers was a lark... I just wanted to get into shows for free! Now that I've drawn about a thousand fliers (and gone through reams of Bristol, mountains of micron pens and rivers of india ink...) I wish I'd made the early investment.

Warlocks flier (2000)



An earlier work, about a year before I started doing fliers for the Beachland and the Grog Shop. The Warlocks and Razak were both great bands, but I don't think Walleye actually played this show. I don't think Walleye actually existed, come to think of it... 

Gypsy Hawk flier (2011)



One of the guys from Octolope suggested that I do something with "an ancient obelisk" so I did this. The obelisk is buried beneath the sand...

Parting Gifts flier (2011)



I wish that I could reuse this image a million times. Inspriration for this struck when I looked out my window.

Appleseed Cast flier (2010)


I was watching "Day of the Dead" and it inspired this flier. There's a shot in the film, right before we meet Bub for the first time, that looks a bit like this. The grey tone was made with the last little bit of Chartpak Format Sheet that I had.




Koffin Kats flier (2009)



This was drawn with candle smoke on coated paper.

Six Heads poster (2010)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Six Heads and Todd Whitten's review...
Six Heads


Witless, excruciatingly repulsive pseudo-remake of Budd Boetticher's fine western Seven Men From Now (one presumes the seventh head and all bodies were omitted for budgetary reasons). The wooden cast is livened with copious viscera and deadened by leaden direction. Notable only as the nadir of the awful, licentious depths plumbed by fringe elements of the film industry following the collapse of the Production Code.


Leslie Halliwell. Halliwell's Film Guide. 1977 Edition. Omitted from subsequent editions.
Six Heads poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Six Heads review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Noel Nightmare poster (2011)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Noel Nightmare  and Todd Whitten's review...


Noel Nightmare


With his astonishing Noel Nightmare, director Jerry Evans draws us so deeply into his private, heatedly nihilistic moral universe, it is difficult as one staggers woozily from the darkened theater to consider the possibility that a safe haven exists outside of Evans-world, where motives are buried in mounds of grift and bonds dissolve as easily as wet tissue. Neither the unremitting bleakness of Paper Tigers nor the autumnal sentimentality of Last Of The Old-Time Mexican Gunrunners prepares the viewer for this unblinking descent into the aching heart of a besieged poet, violently flailing against the whips of his many oppressors.

Ostensibly a story about a pair of renegade assassins pursued by rogue CIA operatives, Noel Nightmare contains little actual narrative. The scenes proceed more or less chronologically but are interspersed with disorienting flashbacks showing events that may or may not have happened. The organizing principle is less forward momentum to a satisfying conclusion than poetic contemplation of the struggles of the artist in an artless, commercialized society.

As early as 1972, shortly after the critical and commercial triumph of The Avenging Furies but shortly before the critical and commercial disaster of the ill-conceived rodeo-world trifle Big Mister Conroy, Evans was quoted in a Playboy interview on the subject of film producers and movie executives: “They're just a bunch of bloodthirsty child rapists. They won't let me make the movies I want. So I drink. I stew. I write. I start swinging haymakers at any man wearing a tie and any woman at all. Fuck everyone.”

His tender, aching soul ripped asunder by years of petty bickering with artless hacks and aesthetically stunted moneymen, Jerry Evans has taken deeper cuts in recent years, cuts that bleed unbound onto the heartrending celluloid of Noel Nightmare. When Calhoun Steele -- his face an unrecognizable mangled mess following his cruel betrayal by long-time co-assassin and ostensible best friend Dalton Manley -- stares through blood-soaked eyes at the sneering face of the evil CIA director who slaughtered his children after raping and disemboweling his wife, we realize that we are, in fact, hearing a cri-du-coeur from the battered spirit of Jerry Evans, the peerless elegist of the Old West, howling from deep within the unimaginable pain of a life of profound creative frustration.


Pauline Kael. When The Lights Go Down. 1980. Originally appeared in The New Yorker as "Notes On The Nihilistic Poetry Of Jerry Evans."
Noel Nightmare poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Noel Nightmare review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Lake Erie Monster poster (2010)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for the Lake Erie Monster and Todd Whitten's review...


There are films that demand undivided attention. Lake Erie Monster is one of them...

Although there are rumors of a past life as a professor of English and a shady investor in real estate, almost all of what we know or need to know for certain of Lee Lambert is what we can glean from his films. In this respect, he is the most pure of filmmakers. Whether the subject matter was cannibal Cajuns in the Louisiana bayou, teenage hotrodders in Baja California, or spectral aliens in East St Louis, Lambert always brought a literate, nineteenth-century consciousness to bear, infusing his sometimes dismal stories with a warm, aching humanity impossible to achieve in any other medium. To watch his films is to experience a poetic attentiveness to time and place and character that rivals Balzac...

Although Lorentz Szsaszy is credited as cinematographer – his sole credit, according to Halliwell – the penny-pinching practices of producer Vito I. Cohen were known to include forcing his non-union technicians to perform multiple duties. Given that the look of Lake Erie Monster is consistent with earlier Lambert films, particularly Blue Hell, we can only assume that Lambert himself was responsible for the luminous, mysterious Cleveland that appears in the film. The alteration of lingering shots of toxic sludge bubbling on the shores of Lake Erie with the frightened faces of the lead characters, the delicate and moving tracking shots following the monster's point of view, the strangely pastoral Cleveland skyline... these masterful techniques generate powerful emotions in the viewer that are difficult to describe or explain – they can only be experienced...

Lake Erie Monster is presented as a simple ecological scare drama, but when it presses the right buttons, it is a poem worth untold fortunes.


Francois Truffaut. The Films In My Life. 1978.
Lake Erie Monster poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Border Patrol poster (2011)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Border Patrol and Todd Whitten's review...

Border Patrol


The general critical reception accorded to Border Patrol would appear staggeringly obtuse if one had not been well prepared for it by many precedents. While the bulk of Newbrook Releasing's output fell far beneath the apprehension of general critical awareness throughout the seventies, probably owing to its consisting almost entirely of “pornography” (albeit “pornography” clearly infused with radical critiques of conventional sexual morality and filmed with a revolutionary aesthetic sense seldom seen outside Godard's work of the early seventies), Border Patrol represented a stark change of direction for a company associated in the public mind solely with sub-Deep Throat invocations to onanism...

Producer Larry Gellar used a revolving crew of journeyman nonentities as directors (and, occasionally, lovers) to project his intensely intimate visions on screen. Where Heavy Barry And The World Of Women and Easy, Cheap, Or Free utilized human bodies as symbolic representations of political bodies “penetrating” each other in all manner and variety, Border Patrol, executes the interpenetration of political bodies with extreme literalness – a bluntness perhaps too extreme for most commentators to recognize, particularly given the discomfiting thoughts on racial and gender relationships that such frankness inevitably calls forth. When, for instance, one considers Gellar's sexual politics while regarding the renegade Americans “butting-up” against the ruthless border patrols of The Zone, perhaps the notions suggested are rather too prickly for the repressed.

...Even now, nearly a decade after the fact, the success of Border Patrol, as both a product and a work of art (a seeming paradox that Gellar would have surely, if druggily, appreciated), is nothing short of startling. Filmed -- amazingly -- at the same time as The Road Warrior -- which it surpasses at all levels of artistry -- Border Patrol was treated as a second-hand clone of a film which bore no influence on it whatsoever. The profusion of cheap merchandising released in its wake did little to encourage the attention of serious critics, though it did add a perfect twist of irony to the clear Leninist/Guevaraist undertones of Border Patrol: Gellar's most perfectly realized expression had been reduced to a simple product-breeding commodity, the profits of which likely ended up in the pockets of the the same criminals who not only had him killed, but preemptively tarnished the film's reputation by almost immediately releasing a witless porn parody painfully devoid of Gellar's radical subtexts, the execrably heterosexist Beaver Patrol.


Robin Wood. Newbrook's Films Revisited (Revised Edition). 1989.

Border Patrol poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Fantasm Jones poster (2011)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Fantasm Jones and Todd Whitten's review...

Fantasm Jones


With a fall slate brimming with the usual celluloid pablum and bijou detritus, it is an absolute delight to stumble upon an unexpected triumph in the form of the mighty Fantasm Jones. A full-bore, fast-paced, high-octane thrill-a-coaster geared to the urban black market, this rippingly fabulous drugs-and-violence ghetto extravaganza is sure to find a happy homecoming in the lilliest of lily-white picket-fence America. “Will it play in Peoria?” the producers ask. “Damn straight!” says Fantasm Jones.

This rollicking bauble kicks off in overdrive when the daughter of a voodoo priestess flips her wig on skag and ends up with a one-way ticket to ODeadsville. The fearsome voodoo mama wreaks bloody vengeance, laying a deadly curse on all the heroin in Harlem, transforming zonked-out junk zombies into the cannibalistic flesh-eating kind. Who can possibly save Harlem's junkie scene?

Fantastic Jones, that's who! A lovable scoundrel and rogue, Fantastic is a high-level heroin distributor cut from the finest cloth, dealing exclusively in 90% pure China White and offering a sliding price scale that affords even the poorest of the poor easy access to prime horse, Fantastic gets to puzzling over why his dealers are dropping like flies and his track-armed customers keep trying to gnaw his manly black flesh. Quick on the case like a zombie-busting Superfly, a brain-shooting Shaft, and a too-sexy-by-half Cleopatra Jones all rolled into one awesome spectacle of superblackness, Fantastic takes on the voodoo squares like Ahab takes on whales. However, unlike that pantywaist twinkletoes Ahab, Fantastic gets the job done right!

Four big black stars for this one. Special kudos go out to newly-minted Afrosuperstar Pierce Crabtree -- a man among men, the toughest knuckle-dusting punk-smoker since Lee Marvin – who would, if there were any justice in the film business, take the reins of the James Bond series from that tweedletwink polesmoker Roger Moore by next Thursday.

A pulsatingly romantic soundtrack album, featuring the sultry single “Fantasm Jones,” is availably on Soul Dec Records. Buy it on your way home from your second consecutive viewing of the utterly fabulous Fantasm Jones.


Rex Reed. Valentines And Vitriol. 1977.

Fantasm Jones poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Fantasm Jones review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten.

Don't Go In the Yard poster (2010)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Don't Go In the Yard and Todd Whitten's review...

Don't Go In The Yard


My West Virginia roots run deep and long as a mountain stream. My great-grandparents lived in an antebellum mansion along the Bluestone River in Bramwell down in Mercer County – the very same mansion we rented decades later to film Don't Go In The Yard. They earned their fortune selling coal carts and other equipment to the Pocahontas mining companies and also owned a major share in the famous Bramwell Bank. Of course, like most of the so-called “Bramwell Millionaires,” they lost almost everything in the crash of '33.

However, unlike a lot of the “Bramwell Millionaires,” my family was as savvy about arts and culture as they were about the coal business. I think it was this twin heritage – lost wealth and a passion for art – that compelled me to make Don't Go In The Yard...

I thought of the movie as a metaphorical retelling of the history of Bramwell; of the hazards of becoming small-minded and insular and of the way that the world can turn on you in unexpected ways and take away everything. I had to keep these intentions hidden pretty deeply, because I also wanted to make a commercial film, not a boring old history lecture. So I used a lot of “exploitative” and “supernatural” elements to hook the audience, which at that time, for this type of film, was almost exclusively the drive-in market...

I hear now that [Don't Go In The Yard] is considered a prime example – and by some, the premier example -- of something called “hicksploitation.” I understand that the term is affectionate and is not intended in a derogatory way. But I want to be clear that we aspired to an honest, sympathetic portrayal that honored Appalachia and its people – albeit within the context of a horror film about a man-eating door-yard!

Years after its first release, Don't Go In The Yard was still making the rounds in the Southern and Appalachian drive-in circuit. Clyde [Wooley] called me and said he saw it at a sold-out drive-in in Reston, VA in the mid-eighties and that it still played well with the crowd. I'm very proud about that.

Jackson J. Canon. How I Made Movies In West Virginia And Never Lost A Dime. 1986.

Don't Go In the Yard poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Don't Go In the Yard review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Crocodile River Massacre poster (2011)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Crocodile River Massacre and Todd Whitten's review...

Crocodile River Massacre


In less visionary hands, Crocodile River Massacre would have been another brackish stream of racist cliches about Europeans battling cannibals and giant amphibians on the Amazon. But in his fifth feature and third consecutive masterpiece, visionary director Carmine Gould – the contrarian, apolitical arch-mystic of the New Neo-Realism – mines the most debased geek fodder of 42nd Street and extracts an epic, ecstatic meditation on the violence of man, the cruelty of nature, the mercilessness of fate, and the destructiveness of passion...

Sumptuously photographed, jaggedly framed, hallucinatory in its precision -- no sequence fails to inspire dread or wonder or a chilling fusion of both: snaking horizontal tracking shots from the river's center across the uninhabitable green hell of the shore; pitiless static shots of entrails unspooling like soft lumber through a devil's saw; spellbinding dissolves between feverish primitive rituals and indolent seaside resorts; leering pans down the researcher's naked body, dripping blood and sweat; the sinuous monster crocodile, beholden only to its elemental drive to consume, slithering among the roots and vines like an anthropomorphic personification of divine vengeance...

The overall impression is of a world ruled by godless, unforgiving chaos and the active malice of the seemingly indifferent forces of nature. The placid, hypnotic score by Chilam Balam undulates throughout, uninterrupted, suggesting only the slimmest chance of redemption in an unremittingly hostile, violent world. Nature battles man; man battles nature; man battles man; nature battles nature. Unceasing warfare defines all existence, and the only victors in the war of life are malevolence and carnage.



Manny Farber. Film Comment. September/October, 1979.
Crocodile River Massacre poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Crocodile River Massacre review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Friday, September 16, 2011

Spacefighter Z poster (2010)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Spacefighter Z and Todd Whitten's review...

Spacefighter Z


Excerpt of an interview with film composer Dwight Scruggs.

Harry Alan Potamkin: How did you get involved with Omicidio?

Dwight Scruggs: I was sort of the third-string staff bass player at Stax. Just bumming around the Memphis music scene, pick-up gigs, jamming, stuff like that. Stax was a shadow of its former self at the time. They'd barely resumed operations after a couple of years of nothing. Somehow they got the idea to sign this Italian progressive rock group, Omicidio. When Stax flew them over from Rome, their bass player couldn't get through customs. Something about involvement with the Red Brigades. I heard a rumor that he was involved in sending a mail bomb to a federal judge. But I don't know the details. The other guys didn't say much about it. But they liked the way I played, so they hired me. They didn't speak much English and I didn't know any Italian then, so we mainly communicated by jamming. A couple of weeks after I joined up with them, we got a call from Enzio [Lovitz, producer]. I guess one of Enzio's granddaughters was a fan of the band. Enzio wanted to surprise her by having them score one of his movies. Stax was up for anything at this point.

Harry Alan Potamkin: The troubled production of Spacefighter Z is the stuff of film legend. What do you recall from your time working on the project?

Dwight Scruggs: Well, I didn't have much to compare it to. Everything really just seemed kind of normal to me. I had always heard stories about how crazy things could get in the film business, so when I saw Ed [James, screenwriter] and Enzio having writing meetings that seemed to be more about prostitutes and cocaine than an interplanetary zombie rebellion, I figured it was just business as usual. I can tell you, though, that we all had a really great time working on Spacefighter Z. We were like a big family. I mean, I didn't realize at the time that the composer generally didn't get involved until the film was completed, or at least practically completed. I was around a lot, hanging out on the set, goofing around with the tech guys, you know, all sorts of stuff. Lots of fun movie business stuff. Working on film scores always seemed more like a regular job compared to that. A good job. A fun job. But not like the Omicidio days at all.

Harry Alan Potamkin: How did Omicidio approach the scoring process?

Dwight Scruggs: We'd just watch dailies and jam. We recorded everything. We gave the tapes to some weird guy who worked for Enzio. I guess he's the one who edited it into something like a score. And, I mean, let's be honest here. It's really pretty bad. I cringe when I listen to it now. It calls up some great memories, but I've learned so much since then that it just seems really half-baked. I guess we weren't really trying very hard, to be frank. It wasn't really all about the music when we were working on Spacefighter Z. So it's really surprising to me how famous and influential that score has become. I mean, Jerry Goldsmith told me that it inspired his music for Outland. It's just one of those strange things.


Harry Alan Potamkin, Spacefighter Z. BFI Modern Classics, 2002.

Spacefighter Z poster copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Spacefighter Z review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Rape At A Rest Stop poster (2010) and Creepshow flier (2010)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below are my poster for Rape At A Rest Stop and Todd Whitten's review...

Rape At A Rest Stop


Madelyn Ellison portrays the unnamed victim of the title with the fearlessness from which timeless movie icons are born – her stubbornness rivals Vivien Leigh, her expressiveness surpasses Renee Falconetti, her fervor trumps Joan Crawford (or even Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford). If only she'd had her Selznick or her Dreyer, she may have seen her astonishing performance enshrined with a top ranking in lists of “Greatest Performances Of All Time.”

Alas, Ellison was in the hands – in more ways than one -- of Bruno Montoro and the notorious thugs and slimeballs of Cleveland Street Releasing. While the full truth of what really happened between Ellison and then-husband Montoro will likely never be known – accounts differ -- there appears to be at least some truth to Ellison's post-career accusations of physical and mental abuse throughout the period, at least judging by her demeanor in the film. Were she not subjected to extreme maltreatment off-camera – if her performance is, in other words, pure performance – then she is certainly the greatest actress of all time, ranked or otherwise. Even in the single brief scene preceding the pulverizing nineteen-minute rape sequence, Ellison's face looks drained, haunted, and brutalized. The minimal artistry on display in all other filmmaking departments does not inspire confidence that her appearance resulted from creative decisions.

The off-camera stories, coupled with the necessarily ideologically incoherent gender politics of the film itself, are what make the film resonate so deeply for women today. We see the actress, as brutalized as the character she portrays, taking deeply justified vengeance against the men who degraded her, if only against character stand-ins. The nihilistic conclusion, seemingly a wail of hopeless despair, becomes paradoxically transcendent when Ellison's real-life survival and flourishing – at least for a while – is considered.


Molly Haskell. Rape At A Rest Stop: A Reconsideration. 2009.

Special Bonus: Never one to waste an image, I gave the Rape At A Rest Stop poster a side-job as a flier:
Rape At A Rest Stop poster  and Creepshow flier copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Rape At A Rest Stop review copyright 2011 by Todd Whitten

Hellshark poster (2010) and Deadbolt flier (2010)

In late 2010/early 2011 I made 10 posters from imaginary movies. John Greiner made imaginary ephemera from the films (VHS boxes, novelizations, etc.) and Todd Whitten wrote imaginary reviews (by real and imaginary people). Below is my poster for Hellshark and Todd Whitten's review...


Hellshark
It's odd about film fright. People want to be frightened by – more or less – precisely what frightened them before, a fact which goes a good way to explaining the popularity of Salvatore Moscowitz, whose cheap, shameless derivations make one long for the wit and imagination of William Castle. Audiences have come to expect the expected from Moscowitz and Moscowitz has been more than happy to count the receipts that pile up from giving it to them.
This Hell Shark is a different beast. The standard Moscowitz rip-off crudely apes whatever was last fall's big hit. But this curious picture is an improbable smash-up between Jaws and Smokey And The Bandit. One struggles to think of a more inappropriate pairing. It is as if Moscowitz simply tried to stretch his thin budgets far past the breaking point, getting two rip-offs for the price of one without regard to whether the sources fit together in any manner whatsoever. Worse, Hell Shark is overlain with a truly bizarre Indian mysticism that occasionally threatens to make it seem as if the movie has some arcane point to make about Manifest Destiny. You have to stop and ask yourself: “Who is this movie for?”
...Lee Lambert directs with his usual flair for tone and atmosphere. He shows a real fluency in film language, frequently surpassing Spielberg -- particularly in the helicopter shots. Sadly, Lambert's deft eye is once again squandered on a project so far beneath his abilities that one wonders what he could have accomplished with a respectable project and a reasonable budget. Now in the autumn of his long, coulda-been-a-contender career, this seems to be all we will ever know of Lambert.
Stanley Kauffmann. The New Republic. July 1, 1978.

Special Bonus: Never one to waste an image, I gave the Hellshark poster  a side-job as a flier:
 
 

Hellshark poster  and Deadbolt flier copyright 2011 by Jake Kelly, Hellshark review copyright 2011 Todd Whitten

Soul Savers flier (2009) and a Lottery Loser (2009)



In 2009 I did a series of about 7 drawings I called "the Lottery Losers". I took losing lottery tickets I'd found on the ground and drew the loser I imagined might have scratched the ticket, which I attached below the drawing. The above drawing was originally a Lottery Loser, but the Grog Shop needed this flier post haste so I peeled off the ticket and stuck the show information on there. Below is one of the original Lottery Losers...

Creepshow flier (2010)


I was pretty happy with this drawing, if not the text.

Hillbilly Casino flier (2010)


Another visual pun? Yep. The idea of a hillbilly casino where wooden slot machines dispense opossums to the winners was irresistible. I've also always wanted to visit Dollywood.

Builders and Butchers and Sasquatch and the Sickabillys fliers (late 00's)


I have an envelope full of fortune cookie fortunes and I'll occaisonally slap one on a flier. I like the randomness and how most of the time, it'll fit the picture in some strange way. For instance:

Founding Fathers fliers (2010, I think...)



After I drew this, of course, the line-up changed. I didn't want to fuck up this nice image (it never saw the light of day until now) so I just redrew it super quickly and super badly:



After he saw the re-do, my friend Alex asked, "So, you quit doing fliers?"

Deadstring Brothers flier (2010)


Who wouldn't want a little pocket-sized, drunken troubador to whip out every now and then? Do wear a glove when you handle him, though.

Whiskey Daredevils flier (2010)



I've done a lot of Whiskey Daredevils fliers, and they usually involve someone drunkenly doing some daredevil activity. I guess sometimes you have to resort to  the "visual pun"...

Pine Hill Haints flier (2010)


The first version of this flier was a really confusing mess where I tried to use the widow in the Ouija planchette to spell the names of the band. It was an idea that was just too complex and too weird for me.

Non Fiction flier (2010)



This is based on a dream I had where it was the one day a year that you could use a mirror to reflect the moon onto a screen. Yes, I am well aware that that makes almost no sense, but the moon that appeared on the screen was a writhing mass of flaming tentacles and the dream stuck in my head.

Dirtbombs flier (late 00's)



Hey! It's a Dirtbombs flier!

Ted Leo/Pharmacists flier, late 00's




I think I forgot to put the stars in on this one. Maybe I wanted it to be all black? Dunno. I did the text with Letraset.

Jeffree Star flier, late 00's

This flier never saw the light of day, as Jeffree Star cancelled. Since, for once, I'd actually drawn a fairly specific image that related to Jeffree Star I couldn't reuse it. Into the file it went. It's worth noting that I drew heavily on the James Tissot painting below...

El Ten Eleven flier, late 00's





This is certainly the only time I've ever drawn a burqa. I have no idea what's going on in this drawing or how this might relate to any of the bands. You tell me, dude.

Black Mountain Flier, mid-to-late 00's



Whenever I do text that is complex or woven into the image it seems that  one or more of the bands will cancel. Hell's Information replaced some goofs that cancelled and I had to do a fix at the Grog Shop. It looked better before, but I guess it's still alright.

Lemonheads flier, mid-to-late 00's


I based this on a photo my father took while in the Marine Corps, Okinawa, late '50's.

the Forty Fives/Rogers Sisters Flier






I am particularly fond of the crying fat kid in the fourth panel.

Har Mar Superstar Flier, early 00's




This is one of the very few fliers I ever did for the Agora. This show was took place on the same night as the infamous Jungle Party we had at our shitty house in Tremont. As I remember it, Har Mar showed up and took all of the condoms that we were giving out.