I Remember Halloween

The Chuck Biscuits death hoax bummed everyone's trip this week but here's something you can believe, Dear Reader! There is nothing like a 90 minute Halloween Mix Tape to attract ghosts. So I've gone ahead and assembled a special collection of spooky (mostly non-metal) songs for my favorite music-sharing blog, the mighty Cosmic Hearse. Take a ride on the Hearse and download this swingin' abomination for your next monster party. You'll shiver in fiendish delight as the non-believers scream in spinetingling TERROR! After all, isn't that what Halloween is all about? Trick or treat!

GROSS ANATOMY (part 9)

Maintaining a blog is a bit like fucking a corpse. It's fun but it gets lonely sometimes. Google Analytics tells me hundreds of people around the world are reading these posts and yet...so very few leave comments (a notable exception being Professor Holocausto who corrects my grammar). LEAVE SOME FUCKING COMMENTS! On that note, let's roll up our proverbial sleeves and get busy with the latest installment of Gross Anatomy! This time we'll take a look at a shirt design I created for Sacrilege BC to commemorate the re-issue of their raging 1986 debut LP Party With God, one of my favorite gems from the crossover era! I'm not sure if this shirt will be made widely available but the process was a blast. Pun intended. Boom!

My prime directive was simple: pick a song and draw something. I chose 'Fun With Napalm' for its totally infectious chorus and great war imagery. Note the baby impaled on the bayonette. Mostly I just wanted to draw a melting soldier.

Grenades? Bullets? Born To Melt? Bathory reference? Most of these agonizing decisions were worked out at the scribble stage.

I curbed my enthusiasm for detail a bit and worked big and bold. It also dawned on me at some point that the helmet should contain a Sacrilege BC reference: BORN OF HELL (another great song)!

Here's a raw scan of the finished drawing. I kept the line work clean with a Black Sharpie and Micron 03 and I jazzed up the letters a bit because, after all, we're having fun with napalm! you'll obviously attract the opposite sex in droves when you wear this to your next crucial barbecue. Who doesn't like the smell of napalm in the morning? As I mentioned, I'm not entirely sure if this shirt will be made available for order but check NOVEMBER FIRE for updates. While you're there be sure to check out all their killer Halloween shirts! Ok, I'm off to the pumpkin patch!

Until next time...DUCK AND COVER!

The Conqueror Worm

""Even in the grave all is not lost."
~Edgar Allen Poe

If there is one thing Edgar Allan Poe needn't have feared during his tragic life it was "the appalling and intolerable horror" of premature burial. This weekend the celebrated Gothic-Horror writer is finally being laid to rest in Baltimore, Maryland, some 160 years after perishing in complete poverty, obscurity and madness. Perhaps best remembered for his graveyard grimace, immortalized by the U.S. postal system first in 1949 and most recently on a 42 cent stamp issued earlier this year on the occasion of his 200th birthday, Poe's body of work has influenced countless artists with its macabre vision of cosmic treachery and swirling supernatural menace. In a cruel stroke of life imitating art, Poe was himself a born-to-lose fuck up racked with gambling debt and delirium tremens and seemingly driven by a horde of personal demons to eke out a desperate living (to paraphrase another Baltimore denizen) as an itinerant scribe. It was in Baltimore in 1835 that he notoriously married his 13 year old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who would die just three years after his sole brush with success following the publication of his poem 'The Raven', which boasts some of the most popularly recognized verses in the English language ("Once upon a midnight dreary..."). It was in this same city that he himself met his fate at the age of 40, four days after he was found babbling like a madman outside a favorite watering hole (sound familiar?). Only 10 people attended his funeral and one of his sworn enemies presented a scathing obituary that scandalized his legacy. To add further insult to this undignified demise, Poe was buried in the unmarked grave of a pauper. Some years later a relative heard of his degraded memorial, by then overgrown with weeds, and ordered a more stately tombstone but it too was doomed to a terrible fate. According to official records, which read as though culled straight from one of Poe's own morbid tales, the tombstone was destroyed before arriving at the cemetery when a train derailed and plowed through the monument yard! Some guys hold all the aces and eights. This weekend, at the demand of literary fans and academic advocates around the world, the City of Baltimore has assembled several elaborate funerary events to finally pay this master wordsmith his due respect with a proper burial. Two, in fact! Farewell, Mr. Poe. Now, finally, rest in peace.

"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends,
and where the other begins?"
~Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849)