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I really enjoyed drawing Skarsdayle’s horrifying nightcrawler lips on these pages. She doesn’t have any eyes to work with, so all her acting is in those lips, and those lips are playing to the cheap seats.

I’m wondering if that design was partially inspired by a character I dimly remember from when I was little. Have you ever heard of Rock & Rule? Canadian animated sci-fi rock opera from 1983. I must’ve seen it on video a couple years later. Nearly every detail of this thing escapes me now, except that 1) characters were actually killed, which never happened in western animation ca. 1983, and 2) the villain had the craziest lips I’d ever seen.

I found a video! Just look at these things: 

Reading the Wikipedia page, I see the character’s name is Mok Swagger, so yeah, he’s a Mick Jagger caricature, famous lips and all. And the animators really went for it, burning those squirming meat-slabs into my 7-or-8-year-old brain for all time. I’m surprised they didn’t actually get Mick Jagger to voice this guy, since he was definitely acting at that time, but maybe the Rolling Stones don’t accept Canadian dollars. They did get both Lou Reed AND Iggy Pop to provide Mok’s singing voice for different songs (and Blondie’s Debbie Harry as “Angel”!). Would love to have been a fly on the wall for those recording sessions.

Anyway, the level of character and menace they poured into that one facial feature really made an impression on me.

REF ROUNDUP: “Sing this corrosion to me” is a reference to the Sisters of Mercy song “This Corrosion.” I’m not sure why that popped into my head as the ultimate goth reference, but it made me laugh so in it went.

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“EIGHTY. MILLION. DOLLARS.”

That line is making me think of Dr. Evil demanding “ONE MILLION DOLLARS” in Austin Powers. Doesn’t eighty million seems kind of low for an incredibly unique internationally-famous witchcraft spectacular? I just looked it up and Taylor Swift’s tour made over a billion dollars last year. Beyoncé’s was around $600M. Depeche Mode pulled in $180M. Surely watching one of only 57 witches on earth perform incredible acts of conjuring would net somewhere in the same range, even accounting for inflation.

But maybe that’s the wrong point of comparison. Maybe Rivet Hed tours too much. Could be his show’s been parked at the Studz Magnodrome for a while now, sort of like a Vegas residency. I found a list of top-earning recent residencies, and I’m seeing J.Lo at $34M a year, Elton John at $16.2M a year, Lady Gaga at $15.6M a year, etc. So I guess Rivet Hed pulling in $80M in 2004 bucks is pretty impressive.

Dr. Evil comparison rescinded!

REF ROUNDUP: “The ultimate experience in grueling word balloons” is a play on the tagline for the original The Evil Dead, “The Ultimate Experience in Grueling Terror.” Up there in the tagline horror fame with Alien’s “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream,” The Prey’s “It’s Not Human and It’s Got an Axe,” The Thing’s “Man Is the Warmest Place to Hide,” and, of course, Teenagers from Outer Space’s immortal “Thrill-crazed Space Kids Blasting the Flesh Off Humans!”

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

My new book SHOCK CITY is less than two weeks from release, and HELLO LA AREA we have a signing!

THRILLED to be having this thing at Dark Delicacies, a specialty horror book and memorabilia shop in Burbank and one of my favorite places on earth. I’ll be signing alongside fellow creepy comic artist and official ZIM wrangler Moss Lawton. If you’re not familiar with their utterly bad-ass HELLAWEEN series, correct that immediately!! It’s honestly difficult to imagine someone liking my stuff but not theirs.

I have at least one other big signing event coming up in October, probably two, maybe three, and not all of them in California. MORE INFO INCOMING.

Thank you to everyone who’s pre-ordered my book so far, and hope to see you very soon!

NEXT WEEK: NEEDLE. DROP.