Well folks, it’s been another fabulous 7 days of posting fun, and now, I’m spent! LOL!
Tonight, in honor of Black History month, I’d like to share a series of 10 illustrations that I created for Black Inches magazine back in 2007 and 2008. There were 2 5-part serials, “Down Low Fuck” and “The Grid-Iron Grind” that were written by Joss Von Aiken and followed the adventures of RODNEY JOHNSON, Private Dick.
They were a HUGE success with readers of the magazine. These stories were beautifully written, very sexy and really engaging because they were serialized over 10 issues. They had a fun mythology of characters and by the end of it, you were really involved in Rodeny’s exploits, and quite attached to him as a character.
When it came time to create illustrations for the stories, I suggested to my editor that I should design them as old style pulp fiction books. And here are the results. The deadlines for these were monstrous, and I confess, in the end I ran out of time and shamelessly wound up re-working exiting art and adapting it for these faux book covers. You might recognize some poses from Zahn #1 in particular! LOL! Ah, life as an artist under the gun!
Even though I’m not necessarily crazy with the final result of every single piece, looking back on them I can’t help but miss Black Inches magazine and all the years of fun I had working for them.
A few years later, a very talented artist/colorist named GOJIRA beautifully colored the first illustration of “Down Low Fuck”, which remains my favorite in the entire series of 10… but I have to say, his version blows mine completely out of the water. It’s so moody and lush — a perfect tone and mood for the intrepid and always horny Rodney Johnson. You can see more of Gojira’s wonderful work right here!
Happy Black History to all of you! Thanks so much for following my posting blitz this past week. It’s been really great reading your comments and sharing this stuff with you. I’ve got more goodies coming up, so stay tooned!
BIG BIG Hugz + kisses, Patrick XOXOX
All illustrations © Copyright, Patrick Fillion. All rights reserved.