Facing the Future – “The Pack”

Finished this drawing yesterday. It is a continuation of a series that are both a fun personal project and part of the promotional materials for “Mutant Crawl Classics.” Absurdist post-apocalypse fiction has been a part of my creative life from the beginning. As a child, I was fascinated by reprints of Jack Kirby’s “Kamandi; The Last Boy on Earth!,” the Planet of the Apes films, “The Omega Man” and similar stuff. TSR’s “Gamma World” ripped the roof off of my imagination.

This is the fourth drawing in the series – the three previous are shown below. The drawings feature returning characters – headphone guy, the woman, lizard guy and the cat. I fist drew headphone guy back in 1988 or so – he was the “mascot” for an industrial punk noise band I was in… but A) one of the guys involved in the band ended up destroying our friendship and driving me to quit the band with his endless appetite for spite and manipulative narcissism and B) I am not now nor have I even been good at music. Drawing these helped me feel like I reclaimed a lost or stolen bit of my creative past. The fourth image is artwork I originally drew for the band in question – it was used on posters, stickers, etc., and after the band and I parted ways, they released the below single with my (uncredited) artwork on the front. There is more than one band using the name – the one I was (briefly) a part of was active in St. Louis in the late 80s, and, after jettisoning me as a member, the band moved to Chicago where they lasted into the 1990s.