Below are the two covers that’ll be used for the paperback version of Abandoned Cars, which will be released in April. The intention behind having two different covers is to give them the feel of two different issues of a fictitious obscure Golden Era comic book. I’ve gone further in that direction by distressing the images to make them look like tattered old copies. Special thanks to my friend and art director at the Riverfront Times, Tom Carlson,  for showing me some techniques to accomplish the distressed look.

Here’s cover #1:

Below is cover #2:

Below are a few pictures of the complete classic five Temptations miniatures that’ll be included among the cut-outs in FOLKTALES. Now to produce the rest of the diorama – the background setting, stage, screaming fans, etc (see last post)…

And below are the individual characters, starting with Melvin Franklin…

Eddie Kendricks…

and Paul Williams…

In ABANDONED CARS, I produced a series of “collectible cut-outs” seperating several of the graphic short stories (see the ABANDONED CARS section of this weblog). For FOLKTALES, I intend to produce a couple dioramas, the first of which is my homage to the great Temptations, my favorite Motown male vocal group. My dioramic depiction features the “classic five”Temps – David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks, Melvin Franklin, Otis Williams, and Paul Williams (and back when Ruffin, Franklin, and Otis Williams still “conked” their hair – a painful, scalp-burning method of straightening hair that African-American men used in order to sculpt their hair into a pompadour. Malcolm X describes the process very thoroughly in his autobiography). I’ve always been a big fan of the playful and intricate cut-out dioramic scenes created by Red Grooms, so I can’t say this is entirely an original idea; the development of the free-standing cut-outs from Abandoned Cars to dioramic scenes seemed like a natural evolution. It is, in fact, something I’ve wanted to try for a long time. So far I have finished the cut-out of David Ruffin, one of my favorite soul singers of all time, who wasn’t always the Temptation’s frontman, but very often was. I also have finished Otis Williams. Below are the cut-outs in both 2 and 3-D (both seperately and together). But first, I want to introduce you – for those who haven’t a reference point for the Temptations – to the Temptations in action, circa mid 1960’s. In my opinion, never a cooler vocal group ever existed – and they were never cooler than when David Ruffin was their frontman.

Here are the cut-outs I’ve produced so far, starting with David Ruffin in 3-D:

Here’s Ruffin in 2-D:

Here’s Otis Williams in 3-D

…Otis in 2-D:

…and Ruffin and Williams together in 3-D:

Below is the concept sketch depicting how the diorama should generally look when it’s complete. I expect that it’ll change and become more refined as I progress, but this is a fairly useful place-holder:

I couldn’t resist ending this entry with another clip of the Temptations in action. In this case, they perform two songs – the first of which is “The Best Things in Life Are Free”, which isn’t one of their best, but is cool just to see how the Temptations harmonized and danced in sync. The second song is “Wish It Would Rain”, which IS one of my favorites in their repetoire. Please stick it out through the first song to catch Ruffin in all of his thick-rimmed-spectacle & high-Pomp’d glory. It’s worth it.

Below is the sketchbook page depictingthe origins of the whole idea of using the Temptations. Most things seem to begin by doodling in the sketchbook:

…and below is another sketchbook doodle involving a Motown-inspired concept for FOLKTALES. Not sure in what capacity, though. Maybe seperating stories? It all seems to be about exploring ways to include the influence of music into the graphic stories…

Continuing with the theme of 1950’s B sci-fi movies first introduced earlier in the summer with the St Louis Filmmakers Showcase, here the UFO-like movie camera lands in presumably a field covered in snow. Meanwhile, some locals investigate matters. I couldn’t help breaking from the 50’s genre in one way: The boy wearing the Darth Vader mask. I couldn’t help myself. I guess he’s kind of a portrait of the artist at the age of seven. And the guy standing next to the little boy looks a lot like my grandpa Bert, who did everything he could to help me construct and engineer a time machine, but it never really worked very well.

So now that these commercial projects are completed, I can finally get back to comics….and thank God for that.

Here’s the revised version of Arts & Entertainment. The art director decided – quite rightly – that the borders and frames of this piece needed to be more consistent with the other illustrations in the series. Hence the new hand-drawn typography and banner. I decided to leave the rest of the illustration frameless to emphasize the “vastness of space”, etc. I hope this’ll be the last time I upload a picture in this series. The love affair is over; the feeling’s gone. C’est la vie. Ooo-wa…ooo-wa…

Think you already saw a Bars & Clubs illustration for the series? You’re right: It was Santa Claus getting a knee in the gut in the parking lot of a strip club. The client decided to use that for a different purpose, so I had to come up with a revised illustration. This new idea came to me in a dream, actually. Anyway, this is the last in the series.

The client decided to go with colorized section seperators for this eight section project. All of the previous illustrations in this series are now in color, as well. The influence for this image came from, yet again, an old Dick Tracy newspaper daily form the 1930’s.

Another in the Best of St Louis section pieces, SPORTS & RECREATION introduces Bad-Ass Burning Baby to the series. Burning Baby finds his origins in a poster I produced in collaboration with my friend Derek for a Halloween show being put on by a band called Dark Star Orchestra – a Grateful Dead cover band – in 2003. I thought that, for the Best of St Louis series, it would be interesting to pit the Burning Baby against a Kangaroo in some sort of boxing match – a sideshow event quite popular in the classic days of the traveling carnival. It seemed a great venue to show the full capacity of Burning baby’s menacing nature. To emphasize that point, I placed him in the famous pose first struck by Muhammad Ali over the body of a felled Sonny Liston in 1965. Below is the original Halloween poster in which Burning Baby made his debut:

I liked the menacing quality of the baby’s expression so much that I decided to include an echo of it in one of my absurdity posters (see the “absurdity projects” section of my website, jackienoname.com, for more details). See below:

Here’s a picture of some of the absurdity posters in their final state: Pasted to a wall somewhere, in multiples. I couldn’t find a photo of a grouping that included the PLEASE DON’T CRY baby. I remember pasting some down in New Orleans a few years ago, but I can’t find the pictures I took.

By the way, we have copies of this poster available. Let me know if you’re interested: They are $20 a piece.

Although Burning Baby has a traceable history, Kickapoo Kangaroo has not. Nor will he ever, most likely, be making another appearance anywhere else.

While I was searching for the PLEASE DON’T CRY absurdity poster, I stumbled across aonther one that I never put into production, and had, in fact, forgotten all about. So I decided to post it, for old time’s sake.

And, speaking of absurdity projects, below is a picture of myself with one of my lawn ornaments, MAN PRACTICING TAI-CHI. This picture was taken on Nantucket Island, I believe, in around 1959 0r 60. It was taken by my ex-wife Grace, who, as it turned out, never really loved me.

Another in the Best of St Louis series. Here we find Cap’n Clown in a different kind of scenerio.