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5/8/08
This may tickle your ivories -- we've put up an originals page
of Steve's color pencil studies, mostly from Tricks & Treats, and
Rich's pencil drawings from the original Bed & Bondage. As nearly
as we can tell, this is the least budget-annihilating way of owning an
F&L original, so if you happen to have any rebate check money left
over...
Rich plans to be in artist alley at Wizard World Chicago, June 26-29, and Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Aug. 27-Sept.1.
A plethora of F&L product will be offered by our best friends forever, SQP, at Comic-Con International in San Diego (July 24-27), as well.
4/10/08
Bed & Bondage 2 proves there are at
least fifty ways to leave your lover unable to move much of anything at
all, body-part-wise.
It includes a hefty selection of Rich's dwarf-and-woodland-creature-bedecked pencil drawings...
a goodly number of twisted grayscale paintings by Steve...
and a graphic story that will be of at
least passing interest to anyone who was amused by the shenanigans
depicted on cover of B&B 1.
All tightly encased (not in
rubber, unfortunately) between two brand spanking new, full-color, altogether lurid F&L covers.
Check here for a release date.
Some of the brightest new lights in
erotic fantasy illustration are wonderfully represented within the
pages of the recently released Erotic Fantasy Art (Ilex, 192pp.).
Stalwarts such as Brom, Maitz and Sperlonga also appear, as do your very disobedient servants.
Illustration in general and girl art in particular lost a true master with the untimely passing of Dave Stevens.
His women were playful, innocent, sexy and dangerous, often within the
same image. He reintroduced the world to Bettie Page, and his linework
is in a class by itself. We'll definitely miss seeing more of it.
Steranko nuts that we are, we just can't resist recommending this page,
wherein he regales us with the untold stories behind some of his most
memorable comic covers. (Click on the "Steranko Commentary" links.)
10/30/07
Steve and Rich connected with friends old and new, and generally had a whee of a time at local conventions Fallcon (comics) and Arcana (dark fantastic) earlier this month.
The Fallcon vibe is relaxed and
friendly, with a ton of creators and a lot of original art on display
(Joel Thingvall's Wonder Woman display was an education in itself). For
all intents and purposes, it's a national convention with a local feel,
and the folks behind it know their stuff.
Arcana guest George Clayton Johnson spun great stories about writing for the original Twilight Zone series and Ocean's 11
(!). Many of the attendees are professionals and semi-pros, and we got
the sense that everyone at this intimate con was knowledgeable and
enthusiastic about the genre. The auction alone is worth the price of
admission.
If you just can't get enough of us waxing eloquent here, Jazma Online has individual interviews with Steve and Rich, as well as a great many other creators (and a couple of the contestants from Who Wants to Be a Superhero?) Go to the Interview page; we're in there somewhere.
As the feeble sunlight fades from the
frozen tundra, we're gearing up to crank out an all new series of
drawings, paintings and narrative mischief for our forthcoming Bed & Bondage II. (For those of you who've requested more ball gags, we promise to give the notion at least momentary consideration.)
9/16/07
Embarrassingly long in the making,
F&L's Tricks & Treats (we've referred to it on these pages up
to this point for reasons that will be escaping us at any moment as Sweet Cheeks)
is now available for your amusement and edification...if there's
anything to be learned from immodestly-decked-out babes in intricate
situations -- and we think there is.
Therein you'll find 44 or 45 (it's all a
blur to us now, really) of our latest works, all in blazing
debauch-o-color. If you're even vaguely interested in the less
wholesome side of Halloween, cosplay, or general pagan revelry, you'll
find inspiration and succor within these pages. At an outsized 9" X 12"
and $14.95 US the copy in softcover, can one really go wrong? Or, at
least, any more wrong than the ladies herein depicted have done?
Additionally, for those of you who take
your fondness for F&L imagery to the limit, T&T is also
available in an entirely too respectful hardcover edition, at $24.95. So if you've been searching in vain for that perfect family treasure to hand down to the grandkids...
Eventually we hope to offer T&T on
our website, but for now, it's available exclusively from our
publisher. Halloween and Christmas are just around the corner, so
consider obtaining multiple copies for yourself and your clergymen!
Next month we'll pack up our stuff, hop on the University Ave. bus, and spend a couple of days hanging out at Fallcon 2007.
Nestled unassumingly among the oaks and
the corn dog stands of the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, this con
consistently draws a jaw-dropping line-up of guests, which this year
includes Adam Hughes, Dan Brereton, Steve Rude, Kurt Busiek, a lot of
other creators you've actually heard of, and now -- inexplicably --
us.
Stop by and get stuff signed by Steve, or just tell Rich to shut the hell up.
Every so often we get extremely polite
requests to use our images in sig tags and tubing, and we're
usually unable to comply because of various contractual agreements and
individual ownership issues.
Now, however, some sets of our stuff are available via the extremely comprehensive online art showcase at CILM. These guys have everybody, and the babeosity quotient is off the charts.
7/23/07
The nuances of marketing are more or
less lost on us; moreover, in the star chamber that is our publisher's
mighty merchandising machine, we cast exactly no votes.
Sweet Cheeks, as a result, will now be submitted for your approval as Tricks & Treats,
and positioned as more of a celebration of all
things Halloweenish, rather than the slobbering, booty-obsessed
bacchanal it in fact is.
The images remain the same, however, and
even a ground squirrel would be able to dope out where we're coming
from. Still, we hope the adjustment bags us that ever-elusive pagan
feminist demographic.
T&T should be available by early fall, which is an eternity in girl art fan years, so we've produced an interim offering.
F&L's Pocket Pal
is a diminutive (5.5" X 8 1/2") sketchbook, dedicated to the
proposition that bad girls (and good ones) come in small packages. This
32 page b&w collection spotlights Steve's popular tonal studies, as
well as many unseen finished paintings.
Pocket Pal
is signed by Steve and Rich, and limited to 500 copies; it will be
available from Rich at Comic-Con, Wizard World Chicago, and
Dragon*Con.
2/24/07
Illustration House is presenting an
auction of original comic book art February 23-25 in Manhattan.
The auction includes two of our favorite airbrush paintings, Big Gun
(cover for Bill the Galactic Hero #1) and Low Noon (cover for Weird
Western #3).
You can check out the details on these
and other far more legitimate examples of comic book history -- and
place a bid online -- at the Illustration House website.
We rarely work in full airbrush at large sizes anymore, so this would
be a good opportunity to acquire a wholly representative original
F&L artifact.
Or, if you just want to own as much jaw-droppingly beautiful fantasy art as possible by the best contemporary creators in the business, original or not, you could do worse than hunting down a copy of Spectrum,
the latest volume of which (#13) is on sale now. It's edited and
published by the folks who brought you the Frazetta trilogy, and they
really, really know what they're doing.
(One of our pieces, an image from Little
Black Book 3, is ensconced in its pages, bringing down the property
values only slightly.)
Steve can finally count on one hand...his family is very proud.
No, what we mean to say is, Steve can finally count on one hand the number of paintings left to do for the Sweet Cheeks
project. Once finished, the fate of this massive, year-long, Sistine
Chapel ceiling of an undertaking is out of our hands -- but we hope the
summer of '07 will find you getting a little behind in your reading.
10/24/06
Arcana saw fit this year to present
F&L with the Minnesota Fantasy Award; we're honored and a
little embarrassed to find ourselves -- for the first and last
time, we assure you -- grouped with the likes of Terry
Gilliam, Lester Del Rey, Ruth Berman, John Sladek, Joe Lansdale, Greg
Ketter and Philip Rahman, of the indispensable Minneapolis-based publishers Fedogan & Bremer.
Philip was kind enough to present us with a beautiful copy of Howard Wandrei's The Eerie Mr. Murphy, which includes a unsettling portfolio
of drawings by the author. If you're a fan of the sort of lovingly
crafted books more common to the turn of the last century than the
present day, you really owe it to yourself to check out the Fedogan
& Bremer catalogue.
Arcana also had, per-square-foot, one of
the most intriguing art shows we've seen in a good while, with
originals by Virgil Finlay, Don Maitz, Michael Whelan, Howard Wandrei,
Hannes Bok (!) and Vaughn Bode (!!)
We offer our sincere thanks to Eric
Heideman, Scott Wyatt, Dwayne Olson, and everyone at Arcana 36, for
making us far more welcome than we deserved.
It's not exactly "How Stan and Steve
Create Spider-Man", but we've added an ever-so-brief demo of how we go
about doing page a for one of the little stories you find in Haunted
House of Lingerie and, most recently, Bed & Bondage.
What we've done is taken a page from the
story "Crule & Unusual" (in B&B), and speed-walked you through
it from rough to finished page. You'll be asking, "Why can't you do
this like normal comics guys do?", and we'll answer, "Because it's too
hard."
8/25/06
Rich was standing in the middle of
of the main hall at Comic-Con International on Saturday, about when they had
to stop selling tickets because it was just too ridiculously crowded, and
he got the same feeling as when he watched everynerd Peter
Jackson walk right over immaculately appointed Hollywood
royalty to accept just about every Academy Award there was for Lord of
the Rings III.
And the feeling was: This is our time. We are abroad and aloose, and will not
be put back. Look upon our works, ye mighty, and despair.
Then he made as much of a beeline as possible for the
facilities, because he was full of coffee.
Apart from drawing at the
SQP booth and finding cell phones on the sidewalks of San Diego (final
tally:2), Rich enjoyed breakfast sandwiches at the Cheese Shop (go
with the biscuit instead of the English muffin), good-natured banter with the publisher fellows, and sleeping.
Bed & Bondage made its debut at Comic-Con, and did quite well, considering its conspicuous lack of ball gags.
If you were there, but had better things to do (was that
Kevin Smith?!) you might yet procure a hot-off-the-presses copy at
Dragon*Con. Look for Rich in Artist Alley.
6/15/06
If there's one commandment amongst comic
art types. it's probably Thou Shalt Not Go to San Diego Without
New Material. A few months ago, when we were about halfway
through the 44-odd (and we mean odd) new paintings for
Sweet Cheeks, we were able to calculate with a fair degree
of accuracy that the rest weren't going to be done in time for
the big show unless we took on a couple of sizable crystal meth
habits.
So, after a brief summit with They Who
Write the Checks, we temporarily set Cheeks aside, and
plunged headlong into plan B. Or rather, plan B&B.
If you enjoyed spending a night or two
at our Haunted House of Lingerie, you should make plans
to check into an equally twisted establishment, Rich Larson's
Bed & Bondage.
B&B marks our return to the ever-popular
sketchbook format pioneered by SQP more than a decade ago. Therein
you'll find drawings by Rich, paintings by Steve, and a whimsical
(if you're Elizabeth Bathory) story featuring the popular ladies
from our Spanking Tails print. What more could you ask?
How about brand new front and back cover paintings, in blazing
Constricto-Color!
Oh yes--and copious, fully gratuitous semi-nudity.
Float on over to the SQP booth at Comic-Con International (with
100,000+ attendees, your feet won't be touching the floor often)
next month, and grab yourself an autographed copy!
Now that Bed & Bondage is out
the door, it's full speed ahead on Sweet Cheeks.
The plan is to have this project available
for your posterior-centric pleasure in 2007.
We're more than halfway through, and we'll
be pausing only long enough to tackle a private commission every
now and then--because they let us stretch our spindly legs, subject-matter-wise.
Spider-Man and Morbius © Marvel Comics
Since we both grew up on superhero comics
and monster and sf movies, we're tickled pink to revisit those
themes any chance we get.
X-Men and Magneto © Marvel Comics
Our commissioned works in the last few
months have run the gamut from pencil drawings to watercolors
to grayscale and color marker and airbrush paintings. (If you
think you might be interested in commissioning your own original,
here are some details.)
Like American Idol, but for diametrically
opposite reasons, listening to Atlanta's the Cogburns
makes us want to drink and bust stuff up. If Justin and Kanye and Gwen
and Fergie make you want to reach for the claw hammer, we heartily
recommend this new cd, for which we were thrilled to supply the cover
art.
Some of our favorite images from the F&L
pantheon are back as covers for Nick
Pollotta's unstoppable Bureau 13 franchise.
A laurel, and hearty handshake to the designers
at Wildside for the tasteful type treatment.
(Our cover for Nick's That
Darn Squid God remains everybody's favorite rendition
of a giant cephalopod trashing Victorian London.)
The B13 series steamrollers ever onward,
with at least two more F&L paintings tagged for projects
in the works.
(Previous news can be found here.)
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