Art

I totally stole this from artist/producer Denys Cowan's FB page, but it's an interesting little sidenote, Back in the 90s people still read magazines, and liquor companies would purchase full page advertisements in these magazines. Man, history is SO WEIRD, right? Anyway, Dewars scotch ran a series of profiles of debonair achievers attempting to convince you that if you drank their scotch you would also be a debonair achiever. Cowan, then well known for his Batman and Question comics and about to co-found Milestone Media, was a fitting choice but it did seem like a win for comics at the time. This predated the Rob Liefeld Levis commercial, but both are a reminder that cartoonists as media figures is far from a recent phenomenon.

If there's one person who loves Halloween and scary monsters more than us it's artist Francesco Francavilla who has been running his own 31 Days of Horror event on his twitter feed with daily art and process posts. You can more or less follow along at the hashtag #fffear but here's a sample:

JO Applegate is an illustrator who has appeared in The Classical, ESPN Playbook, SI Extra Mustard, Buzzfeed Sports and Dime Magazine among others and he passed along some art he did for a Halloween art show:

Yesterday was National Cat Day and Marvel celebrated by showing casing these covers by Jenny Park, who specializing in painting famous pop culture...

The last New York show of the year is on its way with Comic Arts Brooklyn taking place November 8-9th and this year the festival will be associated with several art shows and exhibits which all pretty top notch, including a very rare appearance by Julie Doucet, an Al Jaffee art show, a repurposed animation cel show and an exhibit of work by the Finnish collective Kutikuti. All FREE! Here's all the dates and times:

As you can imagine, we're not the only website counting down Halloween month. Chris Schweizer, comics educator and the man behind the delightful Crogan's Adventures series from Oni, is posting a mostly daily monster picture  and here's today's the Florida Swamp Ape. You can see the rest in the link like this Ghost Rider in the Sky:

 

Well, $412 seems absurdly low to us, anyway. Renowned horror/fantasy artist Templesmith has been experimenting with hand-painted covers for several books, and this is an original one of a kind oil painting done on a copy of The Walking Dead Volume 1. The painting was varnished, and I don't know if you can read the book inside, but it seems to me that this is a pretty darned sweet collectible...especially for Halloween. Also...Christmas is coming. More Templesmith stuff at the 78Squid retail website.

Want to read a 96 graphic novel about a young woman and a time travelling ghost for FREE? You can read about the making of the book at the Under the Apple Tree webpage and download it here. Cartoonist Sarah Winifred Searle created it as part of a Children’s Writer-in-Residence at the Boston Public Library. here's the logline:

Fall is in the air, bringing a crisp step and the crunch of leaves under foot, and the inevitable—perhaps inescapable—presence of Pumpkin Spice everything all around us! Yes, it's time for 31 Days of Halloween, The Beat's annual tribute to our MOST FAVORITEST TIME OF YEAR. And let's get things going with probably the most obvious link possible...but I have ever written about painter/cartoonist/musician Menton3 on The Beat before so here goes! Based in Chicago, Menton3—aka Menton J Matthews III—is a painter of atmospheric and disturbing images. While you can find a lot of his work at his website, he's probably best known these days as a partner in 44Flood, a publishing company that has teamed with IDW to put out art books and comics. Along with fellow artists Kasra Ghanbari, Ben Templesmith and Nick Idell, 44Flood has put out Tome, an artbook which was mostly Kickstarted, Templesmith's The Squidder, the comic Monocyte, which you see on this page, and Libretto, an anthology of eerieness centering on vampirism. A new volume of Tome is on its way or already here (I couldn't find a lot of solid news about the bunch.)

StarWars.com has unveiled Joe Quesada's variant cover to Star Wars #1. The first Marvel issue of the 21st century will debut in January with story by Jason Aaron, and art by John Cassaday and Laura MArtin.. MArtin colored Quesada's cover. Marvel's e-i-c- wrote:

As they do periodically, TCJ.com is running a cartoonist diary; this week it's Eleanor Davis. Her collection How To Be Happy is out now...

Okay, unless the unforeseen happens I swear this is the LAST Beat post about Spider-Woman's butt. But One of the bingo card arguments trotted...