Silly as it always it is I try to have a new goal of some kind each year. Not with the strict perimeters of a New Year’s Resolution weight goal, but a vague direction I can slowly steer towards. My big one this year was to stop doing art in a vacuum. Which is to say, work with other people and participate alongside other artists more often. I kinda locked my process into this very solitary thing, which shocking for a man who has spent years off and on living alone in the woods. Turns out it makes a very lonely pursuit where you just end up feeling like you are uploading pages to the ether. Hence my goal for 2023. Happy to say I’ve lined up some exciting collaborations for the year, but those are stories for another time. And those are work things! I also wanted to extend this goal to fun things! So here we are.
An artist I’ve been really digging in the last couple years is Alejandro Bruzzese. He captures a sort of ethereal physicality to all of his drawings. And his range of sci-fi art just really really appeals to me. So when he did a call for art trades I jumped on it.
We each gave each other the choice of three character to pick from. For my end I drew his creation of Neura!
Alejandro Bruzzese’s Neura
I immediately loved the character. The mix of the mythical and mundane are a favorite of mine. So adorning characters of a godlike nature and physique in modern sportswear is right up my alley. I always feel like it’s an immediate way to sneak familiarity into the heightened nature of sci-fi and fantasy worlds. So here’s my rendition.
My stab at Neura
For his portion he took on Android Etta. Gotta say I’m in love with it. From the pose to the colors to how puffy he made that jacket.
Alejandro’s view of Android Etta
I think art trades like this are really in a lot of ways an act of translation. What elements of your design are retained and which quirks of your style are replaced by someone else’s particular stylistic quirks? It’s a cool process, and like I noted in the previous blog post it really helps you see your own characters in a completely new way. This is not how I would draw Etta, but this is Etta through and through. I learn more about her when I see her through another artist’s hands.
So in summary, if you want to have some real fun and have the time do some art trades!
You can find Alejandro Bruzzese at his website and twitter. You should really dive into the Sunday section of his site. It will make you feel like an archeologist of the future and that’s a rad feeling.
My other 2023 goal is to try and make the blog a much more active part of the site, but this has been a goal for a few years now. So uh, good luck Gus.
Couple days ago my good friend, Callum Clayton, surprised me with an absolutely gorgeous drawing of the Tourist. Dare I say it might be my favorite drawing of her? Mine included? He always manages to imbue her with a lot of personality that is completely accurate to the character, but also facets I wouldn’t hit myself. That’s the fun of seeing your characters through another perspective. Feels like you are learning something about them you didn’t entirely mine yourself.
Callum’s also been on a parallel trip with Tourist Unknown long enough that he could track his own evolution of drawing her. Very cool stuff to see.
Hey friends! Just one of those event heads up! If you are in Northwest Arkansas and are feeling comfortable with live events, I’ll be a part of the Death Ray Illustration and Print Expo show in Fayetteville, Arkansas this Saturday, October 30th. It’s got a wonderful collection of local artists and comic creators. Like true embarrassment of riches kind of stuff.
It’s also a pretty stellar place to grab some holiday gifts and get them in time to be wrapped. Lot of these folks, myself included, do a lot of the shipping and business end stuff on their own. And it’s looking like one of those years that last minute shipping might be impossible. Though who knows! I might be hermit in the woods, but not one of the seer kinds that can tell the future.
In any case, I’ll have the softcovers and (rapidly dwindling supply of) hardcovers of Volume 1 and 2 as well as En Route #1! Oh and whatever supply I have left of Eve of the Ozarks! And every other table will have just so many cool cool prints, comics, shirts, etc.
So if you are vaxxed up and ready grab a mask and come on down and say hello!
I don’t know how many have of you have followed me from the Eve of the Ozarks days, or hell even the Backwood Folk days. The blog here is new, so if you only ever interacted with this site in particular it’s likely that you know very little about me. I’m from the Ozarks and still planted firmly within them. As cartoonish as the stereotype is, I am an artist hiding out on a far away mountain in a cabin in the woods. It’s enough of a stereotype that I can’t even claim to be *the* artist on this mountain. Too many others around these parts for there to be a definitive article. Which honestly? Solid balm for the ego.
Because of this, most of my early comics were regionally focused with a specific interest into Arkansas and Ozarks folklore. Needless to say I went in quite familiar with the Fouke Monster and the Boggy Creek series. This is our home state Bigfoot variation with three toes after all. I had seen two Boggy Creek movies prior, though weirdly I had never seen the initial outing. Which feels slightly sacrilegious in retrospect.
Now as a point of clarity, Fouke and its mythical creature are in Southern Arkansas and far removed from the Ozarks. As it is with rivalries within state borders as an Ozarker I had to hiss “flatlanders” as often as I could throughout my watch. Truly speaking the culture across the state isn’t as different as much as we like to project at each other. And listen, I’ll side with the flatlanders over the Texans any day of the week. Though let’s be real, not a great time for either state for a lot of reasons. A lot those reasons are Republican, but plenty are rich folks with designs who would be thoroughly disgusted to be lumped in with the former. But it is what it is. So that’s the lens I went in watching The Legend of Boggy Creek with.
The first film forms a solid case that you don’t have to actually make a good movie to have a good movie. It’s not great cinema, but god damnit it sure is Arkansan cinema. There isn’t a narrative to speak of. Just a bunch of locals telling an unseen Charles B Pierce (our director and producer) about their experiences with the creature as reenactments play out. These reenactments are smart enough to never clearly show the monster. Instead we just get a distant shape in the woods buried in layers of trees and swamp. As it turns out though, you can point a camera anywhere in the Arkansas wilderness and have a beautiful looking picture. The hidden corners of this state just bleed the atmosphere of a ghost story. Plop a man in a gorilla costume far from the camera and this low budget movie can provide the kinda shot that a lot of other horror movies would kill for. Though nothing in the movie proves as threatening as a character being driven to the hospital across state lines. A distinct horror score plays over the Welcome to Texas sign. It does this completely oblivious to its potential as a grim portent of both the series’ and the state’s future.
Return to Boggy Creek, an immediate and unofficial sequel starring Dawn Wells of Gilligan’s Island, is a more slight affair. It lacks any of the atmosphere of the original and instead trades for an early live action Disney movie approach to the story. It has its charms, and is probably a solid little spooky movie for the G rated intended audience. It certainly was a VHS babysitter of mine as a pup, but there’s not a lot of ground to cover on it.
However, 1985’s Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues is a smorgasbord to Return’s lunchable. Charles B. Pierce returns here in full force to the point of playing the lead character and ignoring its unofficial predecessor. This movie not only plays on every indulgence of Pierce’s, it also plays on every Arkansan indulgence imaginable. Which is to say it opens on Pierce’s character enjoying some Razorback football. Finally a movie asking “How about them hogs?”
Pierce plays a University of Arkansas Anthropology Professor who has enlisted a bunch of his students into a mad quest to Southern Arkansas to finally answer the question of the Fouke Monster’s existence. Starting the movie at the University of Arkansas and Fayetteville puts this fully in my neck of the woods. It also gives the movie a constant perspective of the state’s various regional rivalries.
The structure of the movie is much like the first, save that the linking elements are an actual story with Pierce and his students having their own encounters and meeting the interviewees before the reenactments begin. They are shaggy things but so filled with Arkansan in-jokes that I can’t help but love it. Whether purposefully or not Pierce increasingly becomes a sort of Colonel Kurtz figure to his students. And his quest seems quite like a tongue in cheek take on the various folklorists and anthropologists who would treat the state as a case study. Because of this the locals of Fouke treat this college professor and his devoted students as city slickers and outsiders. Considering 1985’s Fayetteville this is a somewhat hilarious if accurate little joke on the rural region seeing a small town as “the city.” 2021’s Fayetteville it’s no longer a funny aside but a standard fact. Cut to the modern day and the University of Arkansas would start getting lax on its out of state tuition. The jokes of Fayetteville as the next Austin stopped having punchlines and started being bullet points in boardrooms. Increasingly old farm trucks on the roads of Northwest Arkansas would be replaced by spotless vanity trucks adorned with Texas plates. A more contemporary Boggy Creek II would probably be more accurate to have no Arkansas born characters as the leads.
Parallel to the Boggy Creek, movies a regional grocery store began conquering the world. Northwest Arkansas’s own Walmart would become a publicly traded company just two years before Charles B Pierce’s first film. It’s 25th anniversary followed two years after Boggy Creek II’s release. These are unrelated except for the sake that Walmart’s history would rapidly become synonymous with Arkansas history. In 2011, a massive art museum called Crystal Bridges would open not far from Sam Walton’s very first grocery store or that university that once employed Pierce’s fictional bigfoot hunter. It was a project of his daughter Alice and one that promised to introduce culture to Arkansas. Its accolades were loud enough to drown out the feint sound of a piper’s flute. A lot of us didn’t catch on to it as the first shot in a large effort to rebrand the region as more friendly and more cultured. But that’s a marketer’s dark arts for you. Because it never tells you who they are making it more friendly or more cultured for.
All the spit and twine that built Arkansas would be phased out for state of the art construction. The cities and towns of the region would salivate at the promise of a bold new world and cosigned quickly. Old rickety neighborhoods would be torn apart so towns could have fancy parking garages that they called art corridors. Music scenes and art venues would be replaced with expensive modern condos that were paradoxically less resilient than the spit and twine. After awhile it became apparent the Arkansans too had to be replaced. They couldn’t afford this new Arkansas. Modern places require modern people with modern money after all. Grants operated like bribes and were offered to out of state talent who could afford these new gifts. Turned out moneyed Texas could afford what Arkansans could not. And slowly the identity of a region is changed not by organic growth but total replacement. It’s a sort of culture I suppose.
2011 also saw the release of another unofficial entry in Boggy Creek: The Legend is True. A total remake of the series. One that would ditch its regional trappings and instead take the formula of a modern slasher just with Bigfoot. The spit and twine was replaced by cheap digital cameras and cgi bigfoots. The craggy faced locals were no longer necessary as the young unblemished faces of models could do the job. The regional humor was replaced by blood and jump scares. Haunted shots of the Arkansas wilderness were replaced by floodlights behind the trees. A mimicry of Platinum Dunes to illicit the feeling of a music video versus a folktale. Where was this? It sure didn’t feel like Boggy Creek anymore
Oh.
The Legend of Boggy Creek would be restored and remastered. It’s remastering in 2019 led to theater showings and blurays and inevitably streaming. Available as it was intended to be seen almost everywhere as a cherished little object of Arkansas history and lore. Boggy Creek: The Legend is True has largely vanished and been forgotten. An entity with a recognizable name but no identity.
There is a real specific strain of 80s horror that I always attribute to a select shelf of a middle school friend’s vhs collection. It had weirder and frankly goofier movies than the local supermarket bothered to carry. They carried R ratings, but I think we clearly tell that the 18+ set wasn’t the intended audience. They were stupid, and knowingly so. Goofy things with vaudevillian humor that just followed “nyuk nyuk” eye poking to its logical conclusion. It just makes a certain kind of sense to an adolescent brain. These were the immediate descendants of Sam Raimi. Praise be to that friend’s college aged sister in a far away place sending down her schlocky vhs down to her rural little brother and his even more rural little friend. Frankly, don’t think we would have had a laughing fit to House II: The Second Story or Night of the Creeps without the guidance of a higher intelligence.
Waxwork and Waxwork II: Lost in Time took me right back to sitting cross legged on that shag carpet in front of a tv that likely was the size of a modern tablet. Which is to say, I had a pretty good time.
I went into these knowing they’d been recommended, but without grasping the premise. I presumed it was the 80s horror take on something like House of Wax. I don’t think I was expecting a mixture of Doctor Who and Quantum Leap with every destination being a horror movie. Which I don’t think I need to gesture any harder at my comic to say that would appeal to me.
That’s a Doctor Who
Waxwork has David Warner as a madman out of time with a wax museum full of the greatest monsters across history. Now it’s no surprise to say these monsters aren’t just wax, but it is some to say they are actually frozen moments accessible from through magical portals across time and space. So not only will you get Dana Ashbrook chased by Jonathan Rhys Davies as a werewolf, you will get it through some hidden European woods. It’s all very convoluted, but the movie knows this. What it really wants to do is shutup and play the hits. In essence it takes every little lord Fauntleroy that composes its teen cast and tosses them each into a different horror movie. All of this framed by events outside the museum that build up the rules of the universe as well as delve into its comically over done lore. It all crescendos into one of the wilder ending set pieces this sillier end of the horror comedy can provide. Its set up is the classic villagers storm the castle, but with the caveat that every single kind of monster is here. It ratchets up the gore and kills but never losing the gonzo tone. At a point it feels almost like the anarchy of the ending of Blazing Saddles where various film sets just fall into the brawl. It also lands a joke that made me laugh harder than anything in the last couple years.
Waxwork II: Lost in Time is a rare sequel in these kind of movies. It not only starts directly after the last scene closes but fully expects you to have seen the first movie. And also unlike genre standards, doesn’t retain its villains for its sequel but its surviving protagonists. Our two leads (one who is Gremlins’ own Zach Galligan) are now thoroughly lost in time. Though conveniently for our purposes only in horror time. Fairly early in it completely ditches the contemporary world narrative to just get to the horror vignettes, and it works like gangbusters. The movie switches gears from setting to setting and just unleashing a manic chaos across them. Everything from a Hammer Horror tinged Frankenstein tale with an especially gruesome comedic end to a take on horror sci-fi with an Alien riff. Though it is never strong than in a black and white haunted house tale. Here they pull in Bruce Campbell, frankly the hero of that prior mention VHS shelf. And if this movie has anything figured out its how to best deploy him. Which of course is a long digression of just throwing things at Bruce Campbell and just watching him react.
A proud film tradition
So while I missed out some by these movies miraculously not being on that vhs shelf, I’m always happy to discover there are still new little corners for me to find.
Also no ranking this entry. I found both charming and a whole lot of fun. Thorough recommendations to both.
Next time I go back to Arkansas and take a stay at Boggy Creek.
