With Friends Like These...

Here's the last of the Marshal Law drawings, and my favorite of the lot.

I'm a huge fan of Bernie Wrightson, especially his and Bruce Jones's story, "Freak Show".  I think it ranks right up with "Frankenstein" as being his best illustrated story.  Obviously, that story was very much on my mind as I did this illustration (one of the characters is actually based on Wrightson's "Jennifer" from another short story). 
I like the idea of the Marshal Law having a backup cast of freakish characters to pal around with.  I can imagine an interesting backstory for each of these.
On a side note, at least three of the characters in this drawing were based on people I knew at the time.

 Be sure to click to see the detail on this one.

Laying Down the Law

Here's two more of the Marshal Law posters I designed wayyyyy back in the 90's for the metal band of the same name in Newfoundland.  Pretty basic stuff here, mostly focused on letter design (which always has been a weak point for me).
The backstory for this character involved him being a lawman who had been lynched by outlaws, then returned from hell as a Ghost Rider-ish character to dispense justice in a bloody fashion.  Simple enough, but there's potential in there for any number of stories, and the concept was a good fit for the musical genre.  I'm sure Iron Maiden may have taken issue with this had it gone far enough, but it really wasn't intended as a ripoff of Derek Riggs's work on Eddie.  It's just that skulls and black leather are such iconic features of heavy metal music that it made sense to combine them in this way, and the name of the band suggested the form.

I've got one more piece to scan in this set.  If you like these so far, the last one should really blow your socks off!

 

He IS the Law!

Here's another blast from the past.  Back in the wild, free-rolling days of 1990, I was involved with the local music scene in St. John's, Newfoundland.  I rented an apartment with a couple of local musicians and we spent a ridiculous amount of our time either attending shows at the clubs or just hanging out with other musicians.  One of the benefits of this for me was that I occasionally got to do some design work for the bands.
Unfortunately, a lot of this work has been lost as I never bothered to keep copies of the posters I designed.  However, this one project was a favorite of mine and I still have good copies of the work I produced. 

Being a headbanger through and through, one of my favorite local bands at the time was a metal band named "Marshal Law" that did a mix of enjoyable cover tunes (from the likes of Metallica, Slayer and Megadeath) and their own, very good, original work.  (This was, by the way, completely unrelated to either the English metal band by the same name, the American country band by the same name, or the comic book by Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill.)
The band never really did go anywhere, but I thought they could have if they'd bothered.  In fact, I was so taken with them, that I offered to do a series of drawings for their first CD.  I designed a (admittedly Derek Riggs inspired) character for their band, including a backstory that I was prepared to develop into a full comic book if anyone was interested in going in that direction.  Although the band liked the drawings, they broke up shortly afterwards and the work was never used.  So, technically, this is the first time some of this is seeing the light of day (although I do recall seeing a shot of the character clearly taken from my design used as tattoo in Skin & Ink magazine). 
Here are three of the ink drawings produced to pitch the character to the band.  These were not really meant to be finished pieces, but rather to serve as the basis for paintings for the CD.  I've got a few more that I'll post another time as they're scanned.  Enjoy!