I know most of my stuff can be categorized weird with a capital W, but every once in a while I turn out something a little softer and more human. Pencil for storyboard, 2008.

Marker in sketchbook, 1996.

Add this to the growing list of strange real world coincidences that seem to crop up around the over the top satire of ARMY@LOVE. In the second issue, I had a character direct a bombing run with his electric guitar while playing Link Wray.

Thanks to Bryan Galatis for sending along Sgt. Solo, an actual toy soldier with a guitar that’s being used used to drum up awareness of Armed Forces Entertainment. The copy on the package reads: “Plug in your weapon, turn up the power and fire away.”

Another rapidograph direct-to-sketchbook exercise circa 1996.

Spent the last few weeks doing a complete hoe-out of my studio. As I’m bringing stuff back in, I’m finding all kinds of blogworthy sketches and things. Rapidograph in sketchbook, from photo, 1996.

More tattoo designs. Pen and ink, 1993.

Another straight-from-the-id-into-the-sketchbook piece.

Airbrush, collage, 1980

Sometimes when I find an old dried up bug I’ll pop it on the Epson and scan it a super high rez. I’ll use them in collages or just admire their bizarre beauty. This is a potato beetle I found this morning with what appears to be some sort of egg sack in it’s eye socket, scanned at 3200 dpi.

Above, a dream strip from RARE BIT FIENDS starring myself, Steve Bissette and John Totleben. John is also the subject of the short piece that follows which was written for a tribute zine published as a con giveaway many years back. Enjoy.

THE DANCE OF THE DEATH CHICKY
By Rick Veitch

While John Totleben is justifiably renowned for his astonishing pen and ink techniques and stone cold visionary delineation’s of skin crawling horror, a small group of artists who knew John intimately in his student days are more apt to celebrate this gifted artist by recalling his greatest talent: puppetry.

John’s hidden marionette skills made their world debut at the FLYING DUTCHMAN STUDIO (actually a roach-ridden New Jersey flop-house shared by Totleben, Tom Yeates, Steve Bissette, and myself and frequented by various starving artists, hangers on, lost souls and subterranean culture vultures). While retrievable memory cells from those halcyon days are fortunately in short supply, I suspect it began as most things did in that hallowed environment, which was with a slowly dawning awareness among one or more of the DUTCHMEN that important bodily functions had been neglected for too long. In the case of DEATH CHICKY, this would probably have been a painful gnawing at the abused lining of what passed for stomachs among these budding but soon-to-be-lionized comic book geniuses. With the stabbing pangs would begin a mighty and increasingly frantic search of chronically empty pockets and wallets, followed by a shaking down of any hapless visitors or luckless girlfriends and capped with an archeological dig through epic piles of landfilled garbage for left over deposit bottles from the previous weekend’s festivities.

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