MEGAZEEN #12

    The Megazeen of Horror was the brainchild of Jesus Marquez, an idea to bring Megazeen back to life after a long hiatus fraught with printer problems and creative slumps. The concept was to do an old-time pulp horror theme, with the feel of old school EC books.

Obviously, the cover reeks of it. Dan Barlowe did the main image, and I added the side clips form some of the internal pages. I unashamedly assembled the cover as a direct tribute to the old EC's.

The book flat out rocks. Keith Stone opens it up with I Was a Teenage Street Preacher, a story that immediately made him one of my favorite artists. He pulls it off like a Tales From the Crypt episode, good tongue-in-cheek story.

Ben Avery wrote a story called Gideon's Army: The Quick and the Undead, a vampire western that Joe Spicer penciled and I inked. It was an honor to work with them both on it.

Dean Rankine gave us Psalm 23 and the Vampire Death Squad. Dean's got crazy mad skills and an awesome approah to comics. This guy is a flat-out star.

Tom wrote the script for The Eye, which I drew, about a zombie wreaking justice on an unsuspecting guy having an affair. It had originally been written as a part of a larger story by Tom that another artist had been slated to pencil, but he had backed out. My gain.

The book concludes with Frank Gun, art by Dan Barlowe. Dan had plotted the story but never scripted it, so he left that to Tom Hall and me. We turned it into a very old school piece, almost corny in its propoganda, which was the objective. Some people got that, some didn't, but we had a lot of fun doing it. The story has a ton of old horror movie characters, incluing the invisible man (which we somehow left out of the script, but eagle-eyed readers will see the effect).

In the book we also interviewed Aaron Trudgeon for his work on ameteur movies like Impatient Excorcist and Hamtragic. Fascinating guy with a mountain of creativity. We wrapped the inside back cover with some images from our friends from the message board, who all drew some zombie-type characters.

Most people got what we did. We got some criticism as always, from the judgmental holier-than-thous who did not read the book, which is usually the case, so who cares.

Officially, this was our first comic-sized book and the production value is simply amazing. People at comic shows love the book (and can't miss it, usually because we've got a nice big ol poster of it behind us).

Buy it here... if you dare.