revisiting the haps...part 2

okay--

as i am about to embark on a week's long vacation to north carolina's outer banks with my brother, niece, and nephew for, what is sure to be, a wonderful family reunion with my aunt and uncle and large extended family, i am posting some more of craig's fantastic perhapanauts art from over the years, just because, even though i'm the co-creator of these crazy cryptids, i'm also a huge fanboy when it comes to craig's art!

last week, in with several other cool pieces i posted, i slipped in one of the elusive and mysterious covers craig did for our "lost covers" portfolio. truth is, i loved ALL of those plates and so thought i'd re-post the other four here so that you can see how craig made even stories that were just a little tease on the letters pages come to life...


foreshadowing a story we eventually DID get to tell (in perhapanauts:triangle no.3)--well, sort of, this cover not only features big on his first expedition to find the loch ness monster, but also gave me a gift of going all retro on the design/layout! i dig all over those marvel and dc covers from the early seventies that ran a vertical roll call along the left margin and the dream of having a haps cover from that era still makes me smile ear to ear--!




this one, of course, features one of our men in black--who are nothing like will smith or tommy lee jones. i loved the cover once it was done, but felt that the logo and copy really took away from the starkness of this powerful piece. here it is in it's original 'clean' form...





this too was a cool piece craig did to shut me up. at the time i was groovin' all over the style of flash and green lantern artist, daniel acuna, i dug the tone of it all and the sculpting that relied more on color and less on lines. craig said, "oh, yeah. you just do this and this and this and..."
and i was stunned.
i posted one of the earlier alternate color versions (the one i wanted to go with) so you could see another take on it.



and this one--easily one of my all time favorite perhapanauts pieces--i also feel i had a hand in, conceptually speaking. years ago, i started writing a very long-winded, rambling, never-ending children's story called the adventures of punkinhead wheeler. i dreamed of one day publishing it with illustrations of my own. one of the pieces that i actually did and was--surprise!!--proud of featured the characters being hung like a string of paper dolls by a gigantic version of the villain. when we were discussing this lost cover, i suggested the image to craig and he went and made magic out of it.
i love it!



so that's it for this installment of let's look back.
i'll try to post a little something from cape hatteras next week,
but mostly look forward to the startling conclusion to rich woodall and jason copland's SAINTS and SINNERS on Tales from the Perhaps next friday!!
smell ya later!~
todd