February/March 2013 theme: Western

Sunday, June 10, 2012


Okay.  So it's been a while.  Give me a break.  Work on The Spider has been pretty time consuming.  Anyway, here is the image I've done for the "Pulp character in black and white and one color" theme from waaay back.  I chose Lobster Johnson, who is a pulp character created by Mike Mignola in the pages of Hellboy.  In the background is a mummy about to do something terrible I guess.  I thought it looked good.  And I really wanted to draw a mummy for some reason.  I almost did Francesco Francavilla's Black Beetle, but decided on this instead. I could not help but do this one also in full color so that's up here too.

A little background:  A lot of research actually went into this.  I wanted this to be as accurate to the time period as possible.  The Mummy was easy compared to all the items with Lobster Johnson I had to find.  The goggles are actually vintage polaroid 1944 WWII pilot flight goggles.  If you look real close you can actually see a knob in between the lenses for turning to change the color intensity of the lenses.  I guess these were used quite a bit and actually have the same kind of reflective lenses I was looking for so I used them as a reference.  I obviously had to modify the their shape quite a bit but it worked out well.  I have an actual black leather flight cap so that's in there as well.  I looked up and actual WWII ammo belt and then also looked up those WWII gas canisters you see on there as well.  The gun is acurate for the time period as well but I can't remember its name.  The pants are calvary pants, I looked up General Patton for reference on those since I remembered he wore those.  Also--usually Lobster Johnson is depicted with a big belt buckle on his belt, but I remembered that the BPRD agents have those red beacons on there belts today and thought since LB was one of the first BPRD agents why not add that to his belt.  Maybe he's the one that came up with the idea?  I made his jacket a little tighter than usual (not TOO tight but you get my meaning) but that's the way I like it.  The glowing lobster mark on his left hand is my favorite part.

We'll see what I can get to next.  I think Fire and Ice was next...