Yes, a new concept. Well, sort of. More of a What If? if I did decide to go with the idea of using “The Last Club Vamporama” as a springboard for a rebooted concept…
Oh, the name? The Empusa is a flame-haired shape-shifter in Greek mythology. Marie is a flame-haired shape-shifter… in 1982.
And here’s a colour version…
Hah! So here it finally is!!
I’ve given this a lot of thought. I wasn’t planning to publish it. One of the reasons being that my attempt to do a colour version in Photoshop was looking so horrible (IMO), I couldn’t finish it. There were other reasons. See below the artwork for more details!! (Also, page two etc is below the cut, if you’re reading on the front page!)
Anyhow, finally decided to just put it up here and to hell with it…
One note before you read on: these are “original art” scans, before any clean-ups or adjustment, so what you see it what I drew, warts & all.
As referenced here… my newest (and final) two-page Club Vamporama strip—which remains unpublished—committed the grave sin of a tangent on panel one of page two.
By way of sneaking some of this strip’s art onto the blog without publishing the full strip… here we go. Notes below.
Continuing this theme on the 15th anniversary of Club Vamporama (and the year of its demise!!), and following the Marie comparison, here’s two versions of a CV comic-book-that-never-happened cover.
Directly below is the most-recent version, from my moderately productive 2019 period. I’m still fairly happy with this. I don’t think it’s as cool or effective as the 2019 Marie portrait, but it’s OK.
Following up the Club Vamporama, RIP posting, with deference to the strip’s 15th anniversary, here is a reposting of some older arwork that is amongst the best CV visuals (IMO). It’s a portrait of Marie, showcasing her shapeshifting abilities—her hands look large and somewhat reptilian!—from 2019.
I was quite satisfied with this. Hey, I still am…
While scanning the Darkseid piece I posted last month, I also scanned two new pages of comic strip work that I was going to post on here, but ultimately decided not to. About a dozen people have seen the strip privately, and all but one gave me nice feedback on it (the other one says he will comment on it, too, when he has time)…
It was a strip entitled “The Last Club Vamporama”. And it was indeed a finale… and maybe a kind of reboot, too, but we’ll leave it at that.
Well, in theory… as the comic is more or less an imaginary one!
In fact, this image is a reprise of a piece from 2016—see below—featuring Jenni & Marie (and friend). Although only three years old, I recently did a new version… because, it ain’t bad but it coulda been better.
I was working on the art for some new Club Vamporama pages—an initial run of five, followed by a bunch more. Some of this stuff has been scripted for quite a while, and in fact what would be page five of this sequence was originally started and abandoned back in February 2013! (New version will be all-new, I stress. BTW, the four pages leading up to it, including the two below, are newer scripts anyway.)
Anyhow, the complete strip may or may not be finished at some point, so this might be all you get for the foreseeable, I’m afraid…
I’m calling it 2019 because I wanted to revisit a piece I did back in February 2011. I just liked the concept, but the execution was really quite poor—at the time a few people were positive about it, but one person was quite critical… and basically they were right, whatever their motives. It was very amateurish indeed.
A couple of still frames from the last Vamporama shoot (detailed here). Dru Stephenson as Jenni; Elizabeth Hastings as Marie.
As promised yesterday, here’s the other four storyboards for the Club Vamporama title sequence!
I drew six storyboards for the title sequence for Club Vamporama, which we filmed yesterday. Here’s the first two; the other four will be posted tomorrow!
Firstly, All Bad Things news: the shoot will now take place on August 20th. A couple of people dropped out at last minute and we’re currently looking for someone to handle the sound tech. More VERY soon!
Anyhow. Yesterday was the fourth shoot for Club Vamporama, this time uniting Dru and Lizzie (for the first time, as they appear to just miss each other in previous item, even though their scenes were shot five weeks apart!) for a scene set indoors—the so-called “Cthulhu Sketch”, which we previously did an abortive screen test on some months ago—plus a title sequence shot outdoors (storyboards for which I shall be posting tonight or tomorrow).
The third CV shoot was yesterday (following the ones with Dru and Melyza), and was a chance to work with Lizzie Hastings as Marie.
