Gone, gone the form of man...

I hope everybody had a good Christmas. I sure did. To be honest, the whole season leading up to it was exhausting and I felt the Scrooge in me bubbling back to the surface but hanging out with Suze, her awesome family and the cats brought me back around. I had a great time. But four days of overeating, overdrinking (eggnog!) and delivering presents has me ready to get back to my routine.

We got back to town late Saturday and had our own little Christmas, just two (four?) of us. Thanks to Suzanne spoiling me rotten, I got pretty much everything I was hoping for along with some really big surprises like the PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES DVD. (POTZ has a special place in my heart for reasons I’ll go into some other day.) My favorite gift, though, has to be the complete INCREDIBLE HULK TV Series on DVD. I’m really enjoying it and it’s so neat to finally see these episodes in color on our HDTV. When the show was on the air originally, I saw them on a tiny black and white TV set and I never noticed things like Lou’s makeup coming off on people’s clothes or his pink plumber’s crack peeking out when he’d squat down to pick something up. That just adds to the fun, though, and I’m really glad they didn’t go in and fix that stuff digitally. Thanks honey!

My sister-in-law and her husband got me an Amazon gift card which is really coming in handy. I’ve already ordered myself the JACK KIRBY’S DEMON OMNIBUS (along with a book about the SKYWALD HORROR-MOOD.) I was very glad to see DC putting out Kirby’s stuff in hardcover. (Unlike many, I LOVE the “cheap” paper because it makes the books lighter and easier to hold while I’m reading.) It’s been long overdue. I never got the chance to read the stuff when I was a kid because Dad had to pick up his books at the PX on his Army base and sometimes issues would come in and sometimes they wouldn’t. So there were huge gaps in his collection and I just couldn’t get into it. THE DEMON looked interesting but I would get frustrated reading non-consecutive issues and wondering if I’d missed something important and decided to pass. So, when DC announced the FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS series, Mike and I both got really excited. Mike, because he was a bigger Kirby fan than even me and, me, because I could foresee the opportunity for many Christmas gifts for Mike to come. He was impossible to buy for because I just didn’t know what he had. Or liked. His tastes were more sophisticated than mine. But here was something I knew he wanted and I couldn’t wait to give them to him. Unfortunately, that was not to be.

This year, I would have given him the DEMON OMNIBUS. I don’t remember if he posted it on his blog or told me personally but I remember him being very excited about getting the entire set of THE DEMON’s original print run on eBay. Mike didn’t buy a lot of back issues at that point but this was something he really wanted. (I remember thinking he’d have been a great choice for drawing a Demon revival.) He would have been very happy to have the series in a nice hardcover collection. As will I. I just really wish it had come out sooner.

Anyway, that brings me to this post’s sketch. I didn’t have high hopes for it because I’d never so much as doodled the Demon before and don’t have a feel for him. But I wanted to play around with some dry brush technique using some old nearly empty pens and mess around a bit more with my whiteout pen. It was fun but I think it looks rushed. Because it was. I think Etrigan’s noggin is a little small. But I learned a lot by drawing it so I’m happy. I had fun coloring it and that was what I really wanted to concentrate on. I think I got a little over-ambitious though, with the multiple light sources and things might have gotten confusing. I usually can’t tell about these things until I’ve spent some time away from it. I hope you like it and have a great and happy New Year.