GROSS ANATOMY (part 12)

Welcome back to Gross Anatomy, all you Fiends and Monster Kids! Recently I was invited to contribute to the upcoming issue of Roctober, the magazine that celebrates "unjustly obscure musical icons, enigmas, and eccentrics." The theme for issue #49 is "living in the 80's" and editor Jacob Austen was tasteful enough to assemble a non-ironic tribute to Glenn Danzig's demoniacal contributions to that otherwise neon decade. If you read this blog regularly (or have had the dubious pleasure of drinking with me on Halloween), you already know that I worship everything Glenn Danzig created from his skeletal 1977 debut Misfits single Cough/Cool right through the magnificently muscular sophomore Danzig LP Lucifuge in 1990. After that my attention admittedly drifted but I was nonetheless delighted to offer my humble visual and literary gratitude to the man who wrote the soundtrack to my early teenage years. And the rest of my life. But who's counting?

First up was this title image for the article. I wanted to incorporate fonts that would reflect Danzig's evolution throughout the decade. The Misfits logo was originally swiped from Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and the Samhain logo was stolen from a 1959 movie poster for The Giant Gila Monster, so at this point we're looking at several generations worth of "homage". There's so much great imagery to plumb from this fertile period of his career that the challenge was to employ a tiny modicum of discretion and not put the whole baby in the meat slicer (to paraphrase the man himself).

Next, I loosened up a bit with some aimless doodling and soon arrived at this playful caricature. I wanted to take a slightly more serious and reverential approach but this scribble contains a few key components that I decided needed to be featured in the actual drawing, like the Captain Harlock shirt and Unholy Passion succubus...

"I want your skulls, I need your skulls..." I found the perfect reference photo of a young Glenn Danzig in Eerie Von's fantastic photography book Misery Obscura and went to work. One of the things you immediately notice when you attempt to draw Glenn is that his bangs covered his face for almost the entire decade! I might ink this or hit it with watercolors in the future but for the current assignment I wanted it to remain raw and visually cohesive with this old pencil portrait I did way back in 1989...

Speaking of living in the 80's, this portrait remains one of my personal favorites. You can read more about this drawing in my "review" of the first Danzig record in my special column...

Featured in Roctober #49...COMING SOON!

Until next time...

tell your children not to walk my way.