Saturday, April 14, 2007

More Uncle Sam Zombies...

Now that I've opened this can of worms, everything's coming up maggots!

I posted an announcement about
  • Leah Moore and John Reppion's Raise the Dead comic series earlier this week,
  • including a peek at the cover art -- and now there's Uncle Sam zombies crawling out of the woodwork.

    As already noted, I first "saw" the image in a screenplay Tim Lucas wrote and shared with me 20 years ago; at that time, Tim had come up with something original and unique. Alas, the script was never filmed, so that specific image never reached the public eye -- but here it is again, the unsung pop image of 2006.

    Clearly, "its" time has come. Though no one "owes" a debt to Tim, per se, it's still worth noting for the record that his script is the first eruption of that image I personally encountered. Now, Undead Uncle Sam is everywhere.

    Berni Wrightson's ad art for the high-def horror channel Monsters HD includes a fun riff on the old Jack Kamen Creepshow poster art, featuring the nervous young lad with a remote in his hand, Alex Gordon/Edward Kahn's The She Creature playing on TV, and Berni's take on the She Creature malingering outside the boy's bedroom window, peeking in. But relevant to this topic at hand is Wrightson's "Eye Want You!" parody of the famous Flagg Uncle Sam recruitment poster, looking a little worse for the wear
  • (here's the link to the site's liveliest use of Berni's Uncle Sam zombie painting!).

  • (For those of you with long memories, this recalls Wrightson's stylishly done Howard the Duck for President poster, which I still have somewhere in my collection.)

    Well, OK, with Wrightson doing his take on zombie Uncle Sam, you'd think that would be enough. Nope, the new wave of zombie comics has embraced the image like a long lost patriarch come home at last.

    Not counting the Captain America zombie Art Suydam painted for the Marvel Zombies series (itself satirizing the iconic Jack Kirby 'Cap is Back' cover from the '60s), along with the stirring Uncle Sam alternative Raise the Dead cover for Leah and John's series (likewise painted by Art Suydam), it turns out there's a "Cover B" alternative cover to
  • Mark Kidwell & Nat Jones's Image Comics one-shot '68, their undead-in-Vietnam opus (alternative cover pictured as this post's lead; here's a review of their comic by Don MacPherson at Eye on Comics).

  • Even better, to my mind, is Art Suydam's mock Norman Rockwell zombie cover for Raise the Dead #2, which you can get to
  • here, just click on the entry to the Raise the Dead preview link below the double-cover preview image.

  • I would have posted it here, but I wanted to be sure to give you a reason to revisit and spend a little time at Leah and John's site this weekend, which was all I was really trying to do earlier this week anyway.

    And that's enough on that subject, don't you think?
    ___________________

    So, I now have a retail venue in our new home area here in Vermont...

    If you're touring Vermont this spring or summer or fall, and you find yourself on Route 4 in Quechee, VT -- a real easy, short (less than two miles) drive off Interstate 89 -- pop on over to
  • the Quechee Gorge Village
  • and enter
  • the Vermont Antique Mall --
  • -- and visit my collectibles sales booth!


    Hey, my stuff's now in one of those booths crammed with insane, gotta-have-it, gotta-buy-it stuff!

    I'm dealer #653, and the booth is now up and running -- comics, including signed copies of my own publications, are waiting for you there, along with a plethora of collectible books, DVDs, videos, toys, and odds (very odd) and ends.

    They're open seven days a week (July 4th-Labor Day, from 9:30am-5:30pm; Labor Day-July 4th from 10:00am-5:00pm), they're awful nice folks, and this seemed an ideal means of at last giving folks access to my and the Center for Cartoon Studies' work, creations and collectible curios. No, we're not there, but our stuff is -- priced to sell! -- and I'll be refreshing and restocking the booth biweekly, so there will always be something of interest waiting for you there.

    This space prominently feature work from the CCS students, too, with all sales income from their work going to them -- providing a one-stop shopping venue for those of you interested in picking up the students's comics, mini-comics, art, pottery, etc., all signed by the creators. I'll post pics once the booth is closer to its intended status (gotta start somewhere, and right now it's in its infancy) -- but this is likely to remain my (and CCS's) sole retail venue, so make a point of visiting our booth in the Vermont Antique Mall this year!

    Of course, those of you wanting to sample the CCS student comics, graphic novels and minicomics now for sale online can immediately go to
  • the "I Know Joe Kimpel" site and support the next generation of cartoonists with your hard-earned dollars and interest.
  • ____________________


    The Bava Book is Coming -- SOON!

    Have a great weekend...

    Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

    3 Comments:

    Blogger dogboy443 said...

    Funny you mention stopping by...Kathy and I will be on our honeymoon and touring VT from May 22-25 and I'm hoping to head North this time. I want to show her Burlington and stop in at Small Dog in Waitsfield. Maybe check out CCS if it's a possibility and say hi if you're around. Let me know what your schedule looks like.

    The Soon to be Betrothed Mark M.

    4/14/2007  
    Blogger SRBissette said...

    Email me, Mark -- that's our CCS post-graduation week, so there's some commitments I have, but happy to see you! Congrats, soon-to-be-betrothed!

    4/15/2007  
    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Nice to see other people continuing to parody the "I Want You" poster images. Did you know that James Montgomery Flagg is my great-uncle, and that the face of "Uncle Sam" is his?

    I'll probably never produce anything that iconic, but it's something to strive for, anyway. :)

    -Ashley

    4/16/2007  

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