too much snow and ted mckeever!

okay...


well, i'm snowed in today and thought i'd be able to get this post up rather quickly this morning, but it didn't happen that way. jake and i slept in, and then he didn't want to go out. poor dog. and i couldn't blame him. we had about a foot of snow that was then covered by a crusting of sleet which then turned back to snow. and it's still coming down.

then i got talking on the phone with mike for about an hour--and if ya wanna see a really beautiful tellos valentine, head over to mike's blog at www.mikewieringo.com and see what i'm talkin' about.

then i chatted with craig--not as long. he had some baby stuff to attend to.

and here i am.

segue-less.

the first time i ever saw ted mckeever's work was on eddy current, this wacky, wonky comic book that came out in the late 80's. at that time the comics industry was still reeling with the potential of what the black and white explosion had promised. there was some awfully exciting (experimental) stuff coming out back then and, to me, eddy current was the cutting-edgiest!



the next time i saw ted's work was years later on a legends of the dark knight two-parter called engines. i remember this so well because, again to me, ted's style was EXACTLY what i believed a book like legends was supposed to be--many different visions and configurations of the batman legend we all knew by rote. new looks, new pacing, a new world for batman to inhabit each time! i celebrated those issues! they were great!

soon we had ted's all-too-fitting style realizing the elseworld's classics on superman's metropolis, batman nosferatu, and wonder woman: the blue amazon, these written by randy and jean-marc lofficier. i loved these books and the atmosphere ted's stark, lonely, dystopic style brought to them.



so, of course, when craig said, "oh, you know who i talked to and asked about a doing a pin-up...? ted mckeever.", i had a kinda surreal moment.

after i came back around, craig told me that ted said that he actually read the book (!) and craig and i started imagining what a ted mckeever perhapa-pin-up--or as ted put it, pin-upanaut--would look like. it would be darker and edgier than anything we'd seen before. it would look like...it would look like...

...this.



(i will be doing a special post on rico next week to tell of his many passes at coloring this piece, all of which weere just beautiful, and how, eventually, we all agreed that the pin-up was much more powerful in black and white. love ya, rico!)

thanks, ted, for this stunning view of our favorite cryptos! and for all your work over the years!

gotta go shovel!
smell ya later!
todd