Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Art dumper 3/19/14
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Empire of the Ants (story)
I've been scratching the writer's itch lately. It scabs over, and I pick it. Again and again this cycle plays out until the flesh scars over. It becomes tough, like leather. That's what horror is, the wearing down of the psyche. Peeling the layers of sanity like an onion until it's tough.
Deep.
Red.
Anyhow; this might be included in the next fanzine being summoned from the void. Let me know what you think if you read it.
----------------------------
The scorched earth stretched
for painful miles in every direction.
Wind whipped across the empty plane stirring up dirt devils and dusty tornadoes, a constant unyielding force that never seemed to cease. Jaclyn wondered as it rocked her van if it
was this windy in the before times, if somehow the business of life held the
wind at bay. She didn’t live in the
before times, but those ancient rusted structures and tall sky scrapers people
used to inhabit never failed to stir the imagination. She liked to think that the people that lived
in sky scrapers used to stand as tall and proud as the buildings they lived in,
secure in their pole position in the food chain, where now people walked
hunched over from the wind and the invisible burden of survival weighing down
their shoulders, always staring at their feet, terrified of the danger that
lies beneath.
The
van was a black dot moving in constant motion through the waves of heat
emulating from the hot desert floor. In
the distance it resembled an angry little tick kicking up dust and grime. As Jaclyn saw their destination peak over the
crescent of the horizon her foot pushed the gas in anticipation. Another town, another chance; she felt a pit
in her stomach thinking about the last few places they’ve “raked”, as Mike
liked to call it. Their turn out was
poor to be sure, a couple of canned beans, some expired dog food, and a ripped
bag of sugar crawling with bugs. Usually
they take more from a town than it takes from them, but that wasn’t the case in
Bowling Green, Ohio.
Shaw, a wanderer that had been picked up somewhere in California and had rode with them for
several years, a veteran “Raker” for sure, had fallen into a giant sink hole of
crawlers. Mike had described it as
fallen anyways, but to Jaclyn it seemed like the earth had swallowed up Shaw on
purpose, and maybe it had. Maybe the
crawlers were getting smarter.
They
had stripped the screaming flesh from Shaw’s body in under a minute.
Jaclyn
despised mulling over these black thoughts.
It was better not to think of the crawlers but she could feel her mind
drawn to theses little creatures that have defined her existence for so
long. All of her fears, her future, her
life, were wrapped up in the constant marathon run from the crawlers. This nomad existence was due to the fact that
the crawlers always found you if you stayed one place for too long. Mike said he heard on the radio that crawlers
are attracted to vibrations. Jaclyn
couldn’t remember the last time the radio worked, so she took Mike’s story with
a grain of salt, however she couldn’t argue with the logic. Whatever attracted the crawlers was
irrelevant; they always came and they were always hungry.
As
the van raced toward town, the pace picking up as it closes in, she wondered if
even now the crawlers were frantically chasing the vibrations of the tires
spinning on the pavement, if the miles the crawlers had to chase those tires
agitated them, if they were angry with the prey that refused to stay put,
refused to be eaten like it should. She
wondered if they were like wolves who took turns chasing their prey to tire it
out, to conserver the energy of the pack, or if the crawlers they encountered
were already at every town, perturbed at whatever noisy life interrupted their
peaceful tenure as the new masters of earth’s destiny. She had secretly held on to the hope that
there was someplace on earth free of the crawlers, that they weren’t
everywhere, that someday they’d roll into a new town and a parade would greet
them. Children waving blue banners from
their porches as they drove slowly by, streamers raining from some unknown source in
the sky above, the mayor handing over the key to the city amongst jeers and
cheers for the returning heroes. This
thought seemed more dangerous than worrying about the crawlers. Hope was dangerous, infectious, deadly; best
to just concentrate on the real, on the now.
The
reality was they were rolling into another town, much like the hundreds or
thousands of dead towns they’ve seen before.
The slow crunch of gravel as the van crawls onward seems to echo
thunderously off the silent houses and dilapidated store fronts lining the
street. Jaclyn saw a sign that said “MP3
players now 80% off” and wondered what a MP3 was and if it tasted good. She could never shake that eerie feeling of
walking over someone’s grave every time they found a new town to rake. They were rummaging through the memories of a
world gone by; it felt like a violation to her.
Her little band of looters was nothing more than parasitic grave robbers
suckling the marrow from the bones of a dead society. She couldn’t imagine it any other way.
The
van rolled forward and finally lurched to a stop in front of a gas station less
smashed and broken looking than the buildings surrounding it, beckoning the
party of scavengers like moths to a flame.
The crew moved in a dance rehearsed a thousand times before in at least
as many towns. Before the brake was even
done screeching the tire to a halt the van door was open, boots on the
ground. Members ran this way and that,
frantically looking for anything of value, anything to stoke the fires of
survival a little longer. Jaclyn started
her stop watch; ten minutes until the crawlers came. Ten minutes of raking whatever they could
find into the van.
There
were a gaggle of them cramped in that jet black van, each of them with a
specific role, a role so practiced and inbred that they could perform it in
silent concert with one another, never having to speak a word during a rake,
never having time to think twice about the danger lying beneath the soil; the
frantic advance of the crawler swarm.
Jaclyn had been siphoning gas since she was five; she could hardly taste
the rancid liquid anymore when she siphoned gas from the dust choked tanks of
long abandoned cars, but most of the time it never made it to her mouth, and
she certainly never spilled. Mike was
good for raking grocery stores; his long arms could reach all the way to the
top shelf. Sally would take watch, she
was a good climber and could easily climb trees and utility poles in search of
distant dust trails, sink holes, and other tell tale signs of crawlers. The others were “runners”, who would run back
the haul to the van that Mike and the others had raked up in a pile. It saved precious time when packing up to
leave.
4
minutes in, Jaclyn had a good run of gas tanks going; out of the ten she tried
to siphon three of the tanks were near full.
She hadn’t been this lucky since Cincinnati,
which felt like a millennium of dead cities ago.
Jaclyn put on a huge pearly smile, beaming from her lucky draw, when
Sally took the wind out of her high. She
called out dust sightings, lots of them, in all directions. It wasn’t possible.
Typically
the crawlers came from one or two directions and converged on them. The underground network of tunnels they had
built stretched across the continent, but overlapping tunnels were practically
unheard of this far away from any big city.
The crawlers would frantically bore out the tunnel as more insects
crowded the space; above ground it looked like a line being drawn in the sand
by a giant invisible foot. The foot
traced a line at nearly thirty miles per hour; an impossible speed underground
made possible by the crawlers razor sharp appendages and pincers digging
frantically at the sand, the promise of a fresh blood meal close in hand.
Jaclyn
could see Sally turn a shade of green, even from twenty feet off the
ground. The crawlers were tunneling
toward them from all around, something that has never happened. She quickly topped off the van with gas as a
few runners began emptying their pockets inside. Each runner wore clothes laced with pockets
for easy storage on the go, and each pocket was held together by Velcro for quick
access. As each sweaty runner piled into
the back, huffing in great gulps of air, Jaclyn readied herself behind the
wheel of the van for their quick departure.
She grasped the stick shift and noticed her palms glistening with
sweat. Mike was still in the gas station
raking shelves for valuable supplies.
She could see wisps of dust fly glide into the not so distant sky, as if
to punctuate her anxiety. The crawlers
were closing in.
Her
eyes scanned the rear view mirror; she saw the bloodshot streaks in her pupils,
the wrinkles of worry at their crease, her exhaustion worn on her face despite
her best effort to hide it. Down the
road the pavement began to buckle up and bend in, pulsating like a giant black
vein. Gas erupted from the crack, a
brief and loud hissing noise like air being let out of a tire, and then the
crawlers came, thousands of them, mullions of them, angry pincers clacking in
the empty air, mandibles whipping around the ground in a fury, desperate to
follow the breadcrumb trail of smell molecules to the feast they promised. Jaclyn couldn’t make them out at first; they
were too far away and the sun was too bright, all she could see a thousand tiny
moving things bursting from the hole like a nightmare spawned straight from
hell.
“Miiiike!”
she yelled, her voice louder and more pregnant with panic than she
intended. She was supposed to be a
leader; a veteran “Raker”, and here she was panicking like it was her first
run.
After
a few tense, terror filled moments of silence Mike finally emerged from the dark recesses store, boxed items dropping
from his arms as he tried to juggle his load, in one hand he held a bottle of
whiskey and Jaclyn instantly knew what the hold up had been. She cursed him under her breath for his foul
habit. He had to take extra time to
crack the lock on the liquor cabinet.
Whiskey was too fine an item to pass up; it made for a good bargaining
chip even if you weren’t interested in drinking it, but Jaclyn cursed him just
the same for risking all of their lives for a bottle of dummy juice.
Mike
raced to the back of the van; open arms sucked him in as Jaclyn hit the
gas. The van swayed and rocked drunkenly
as she turned around in the road, weaving between spots of broken rubble,
looking for a viable escape route from the crawler swarm. She wheeled the van around dead center in the
street, facing the oncoming crawler swarm.
The translucent red bodies of the insects gave her the brief impression
of a river of blood flowing right at her.
She couldn’t run them over, that was a rookie mistake; their steel
pincers and thorny red thoraxes would easily split the tires. She had witnessed many Rakers attempt to turn
a crawler swarm into road kill, each attempt ending in horrifying disaster. Once she say a whole bus of Rakers flip over
on top of a hill of crawlers. The blood
curdling screams of the trapped passengers being savagely torn to pieces by the
crawlers had turned her stomach for weeks after the incident. She had made more friends giving away her
food rations, but these dark thoughts wore her down like the constant wind
outside, roaring with the hollow anger of the world.
Rushing
toward the steady stream of crawlers, she could feel the panicked eyes of
everyone else in the van burning holes behind her head. Mikey lit a Molotov cocktail, cursing as
flames liked and burned his hand as he held the tipping, burning jar as best as
he could in the racing van. Jaclyn
whipped the van out of the way of the crawlers the last possible second; some
of the crawlers spit their noxious acid at the speeding vehicle, others were
unceremoniously crushed under the screeching wheels. The tires held.. Jaclyn patted herself on the back for asking
for re-enforced kick boards for the van; the metal where the crawler acid left
its scar had already begun to sizzle and molt.
Some passengers began coughing, pulling their shirts over their heads to
help breath in the tight confines of the smoky van. Jaclyn did not take notice; she was too
concentrated on the road and the impossible situation before her.
Another mound of crawlers had appeared dead in
their path; she bobbed the van to the left then right to dodge a broke down
truck, her hair a fury of blonde streaks as she threw her weight against the
wheel. Mikey tossed his burning cocktail
at the mound, the emerging crawlers burst on fire. Some sizzled and popped, a sound that Mikey
found strangely satisfying, like the sound of revenge for all the people he
used to know, all the people devoured by the very swarm hunting them this very
moment.
There
was a time when the crawlers first appeared when the government thought it
could actually beat them. Nobody was
sure where they first came from, there were rumors that it was an experiment to
cross breed giant Japanese hornets with aggressive army ants; a biological
weapon that got loose like a bad Sunday morning B-movie. The government was able to burn the swarms
from the sky, victory was prematurely declared, and then crawlers began
surfacing from the ground. They adapted
and evolved at a dizzying speed. There
were scattered reports of police being baffled by a slew of home murders, the
culprit apparently tunneling into the victim’s home. Then it was everywhere.
By
the time they figured out the crawlers had created an underground network, like
a giant continental ant hive, it was already too late. The world was lost to the crawlers and short
of a miracle there was no winning it back.
The
van roared as it past another crawler mound rising out of the loose dirt
floor. There had never been this many in
one town, never. Jaclyn wondered what
was different about this place, or if they were merely running out of
luck. Every escape route seemed to be
cut off systematically by the crawlers, like they were being herded toward
something. Jaclyn swore as she had to
throw the van in reverse again in retreat from the swarm, the chances of
survival slowly dwindling with each passing minute.
The
jet black van finally emerged from the center of town, passing the neighborhood
and suburban areas. She could see houses
being uprooted from their foundations, breaking into thirds and falling into
ground as the crawlers dug underneath them.
Street signs turned and twisted on their poles as if struck by invisible
hands Jaclyn clenched her jaw as they raced down the neat rows of homes, she
could see the edge of town and their destination. They still had a chance; no crawlers were
ahead of them, no dust plumes, and no warning signs.
Suddenly
the world spun. Jaclyn briefly saw the
gravel buckle under the weight of the van and drop downward. It seemed to happen in slow motion but she
never had time to take her foot off the gas.
One minute they were blazing down the street, the next they were
tumbling in the air below it. The van
spun over side to side like a dryer with an uneven load. It flipped three times in the giant pit that
had suddenly appeared before it and came to rest against a boulder with a
sickening crunch of metal.
Amazingly
Jaclyn never lost consciousness. She had
blood in her eyes and face, sticky sweat blood that she wasn’t sure was
hers. Her head throbbed with pain, her
mind reeled with confusion. She winced from the pain coming from her side; she
was hoping it was just bruised. She had
tumbled over so many times she lost track of which was up and down. And where did this pit come from? Did the crawlers dig it and herd them toward
it; like ranch hands herding dumb cattle to the slaughter? She laughed to herself; at how embarrassed
she felt, how she let everyone down, and how it was about to not matter.
The
crawlers descended on the vehicle from all around. She could hear the click-clack of their
mandibles on the van like rain on a tin roof but only sat and smiled, making no
attempt to get up. It was over. Mike began screaming beside her, wide eyed
like a trapped animal. A few crawlers
had already begun digging chunks of red flesh from his right arm, his left arm
pinned between the seat and crushed dashboard.
In defiance Mike bit a crawler in half, its thorax spilling fresh bug
guts over his chin. Another crawler spit its corrosive acid in his eye. Mike’s pupil boiled and burst.
Jaclyn
looked around the van and was greeted by similar scenes of horror. Pincers frantically tore at the screaming
things before her; the crawlers defiling every possible part of the Raker’s
bodies. Some tore tunnels through the
intestines, others came in through the anus and bore holes all the way up to
the throat, emerging slick with bodily fluids.
Other crawlers seemed to latch to the face, tearing away large strips of
cheek like raw hide. She saw one crawler
munching away at a severed penis and distantly wondered whose it was. Mike’s gurgling death throe beside her let
her know it was her turn. Her true
punishment was seeing what her mistake had cost; the slow and torturous death
of all her friends. What came next, as
the crawlers ate her alive from the feet first, would be her release, her
pardon, from the Empire of the Ants.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Putrid Picks - 2/26/14
Every Wednesday I skip like a school girl down to the local comic shop to catch the latest bloody pulp. I figured I'd mentioned some tasty treats for you ghouls to sink your teeth into:
Empire of the Dead
http://bloody-disgusting.com/news/32...marvel-comics/
We’ve known about it for over a year now, but USA
Today released official details regarding George A. Romero’s upcoming
zombie project with Marvel. The new series, “Empire of the Dead”
continues the “Dead” universe. This time, the zombies will roam the
streets of New York City. Artist Alex Maleev will be providing artwork
for the entire run. The series is set to be 15-issue miniseries,
debuting in January.
Romero says, “It’s a comic book, which means we don’t have to go out and
shoot the stuff. You can let your imagination run wild and do pretty
much anything you want, assuming it’s within the bounds of decency.”
“These zombies are starting to show sparks of real care and concern for
each other,” Romero says. “I’m not going to go all the way to Omega Man
where they take over the world, but I’m having a lot of fun with it.
We’ve got some new rules and new characters, and we’re taking it in a
completely different direction.”
“It’s basically Chicago or Detroit. The city isn’t destroyed, but it’s
just running on its engine, corrupt and no holds barred. It’s a little
bit like the Old West,” says Romero, a lifelong fan of comics.
“That’s what I’m talking about now. There’s hardly any morality anywhere, except of course for our heroes.”
I didn't think TOE TAGS was all that good, but I had some fun with it,
and Romero on zombies always works for me, even when he isn't nailing
them out of the park. It's nice to see the old fart still has something
to say.
It reminds me a lot of Land of the Dead but works better in comic form
and re-invigorated my love of the genre. I can't wait to see what
Zanzibar can do. Such a cool zombie name. The only thing I thought was
"off" was the non-surprise at the end. The solicitations tell you
vampires are in the book so it really doesn't come off as surprising
when they encounter one. There are a lot of Romero-isms in the plot;
heavy on social commentary, zombies getting smarter, the living being
more vile and repulsive in their actions than the dead. A MUST READ for
Romero zombie fans. Definitely better than his last outing.
There should be a new issue on the stands this week. I'm excited, I
really loved the first issue. I like the way Romero refers to the "meat
on the street", with the opening shot of a heaping piles of rats to
greet us. I feel like Barnum views all life on the street as "meat" to
be used and profited from. He walks amongst the zombies picking the
"smart ones" and aggressive ones to fight in his arena kind of like an
employer going out and picking his favorite hires; the smart and
aggressive ones. There are a lot of allusions to the old world of the
Roman gladiators being the same as the current one, people are still as
bloodthirsty. And I believe the long shot of the coliseum with the
crowd waiting outside for the gates to open was a visual allusion to
zombies piling up at the gates. Anybody who has ever stood in a long
line with impatient people knows the feeling of being lost in a sea of
perturbed zombies. Just a lot of context to chew on here, can't wait to rummage through the whole deal.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Last of Us clicker sketch
I love that LAST OF US game for PS3, hoping for a sequel on PS4 with improved graphics and stuff.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Creepy 60 - The Other Side of Hell
Creepy 60 - The Other Side of Hell
story: Bill Dubay art: Gonzalo Mao
The Other Side of hell presents the tale of another unfortunate wino, this time caught in a hallucinogenic dream brilliantly illustrated by Gonzalo Mao, one of the absolute greats. The entire sequence depicts monsters and Egyptian warriors battling across the backdrop of hell as a bum drinks himself to death. Check out Gonzalo's other excellent work below. I have been working on a piece inspired by his work, just taking me a few days. The guy was a devil for the details and fitting in as many awesome depictions of monsters he could in one panel.
Monday, February 17, 2014
the severed hand - Creepy #49
Inspired by the witch from the story "The Severed Hand". Standard sentient killer hand fair, brilliantly illustrated, some nice depictions of Hell rising from a boiling cauldron, a mad doctor, this had it all!
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Odd Worm - Creepy 50
Odd Worm by Al Hewetson. Art by Auraleon
Al Hewetson, famous for his pen work and mad mind behind classick PSYCHO and NIGHTMARE magazine tales, I always admired Al's knack for cutting to the heart of the macabre, hardly a word or line unnecessarily placed. I love this look at the social food chain of life. The worm feeds on the beggar, the rat the worm, the rat eats the cat, and the beggar beats the cat...in the end man is forgotten, the worm reigns supreme.
My silly art:
Creepy issue no. 52 - A Most Private Terror
It's no secret that I am a huge horror nerd and funnybook fan, so I thought I'd drop some thoughts from time to time about random CREEPY stories I've enjoyed from back when horror comics were king and super heroes were still for the soft kids who couldn't handle the real fun stuff.
Creepy issue no. 52
A Most Private Terror
Excellent illustrations by Esteban Maroto of the dark, lonely
Canadian tundra; this minimalist landscape works with the story of a long
hunter, himself haunted by thoughts of a chance were-beast encounter from long
ago. The cold of the night wears on his
body and sanity. The lone hunter suffers
from frost bite and delirium through the night, imagined monsters roam the dark,
and soon he believes he is being hunted by a powerful and deadly arctic
were-bear; but in true Creepy fashion it turns out to be a cute little bitty bunny
rabbit. I particularly enjoyed the piece
of the story where he has to light his legs on fire to keep them from freezing
off, his fingers already useless black digits claimed by the coldness of the
Canadian tundra. A truly desperate plight of a man who considered himself a season woodsman, but there is no hiding from the terror that eats from within. One encounter with a werewolf was enough to taint this guy for life, but I'm still looking for a werewolf chick. I was inspired by this tale, so I drew a little werewolf guy:
Esteban is still creating some killer art to this day. I happen to love this band too. Old school DEATH!
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Monday, February 3, 2014
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