Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #54

Hi Comickos,

Being a fan of comics means constantly mourning the deaths of old men who created or contributed to the creation of things that someone else profited off of. It might feel like my comics column is just turning into the VICE obituary page and that's because it is. Starting sometime in the future I will be changing the name of this column to Nick Gazin's Comic Book Mausoleum. I am unsure if I'm joking or not yet.

Thomas Kinkade, "the painter of light," died. He was an interesting character despite his appreciation by the blandest people on Earth. He drank a lot and he claimed in court that God was his art agent. He was only 54 and it's currently being reported that he died of natural causes. I don't know how the fuck that is possible. My guess is that when you die of natural causes at 54 it's because you are doing just not enough drugs to avoid ODing.

Ralph Bakshi wrote a testimonial about the dead crazy asshole that is Thomas Kinkade. Before Kinkade was "America's most collected artist" he painted the backgrounds for the animated movie Fire & Ice, which Bakshi directed. If you haven't seen it, it's on Netflix Instant and is a great time. It was based on the work of Frank Frazetta and there are tons of shots of a big-assed barbarian girl in a bikini running away from demonic savages. The T&A factor in this movie is ridiculous. Just so much ass. At one point we see her crawl backward out of a hollowed out log. Bakshi is a perv genius.

Also, check out this awesome amendment someone made to one of his paintings where a Cthulu-like monster is rising out of the ocean.

This great blog posted images of Vaughn Bode's early sci-fi illustrations. Bode is best known for his weird, dirty hippie comics like Cheech Wizard, where lizard men fuck human ladies, but he started off in commercial art and more traditional sci-fi. His early stuff was pretty great.

Vaughn Bode's son, Mark Bode, painted this TMNT mural at Meltdown comics back in November with Kevin Eastman, the co-creator of the Ninja Turtles.

Also Kevin Eastman is selling off the often-reprinted original drawings of the Ninja Turtles. Check out his Ebay profile to buy original art from him.

In Japan, Katsuhiro Otomo's GENGA exhibition is blowing people's minds. This is some huge career retrospective and charity fundraiser for Otomo's hometown.

They're showing off thousands of pages of manga in this crazy glass shelf display.

Also this guy built an amazing replica of Kaneda's motorcycle and rode it around Japan to promote the exhibit. It's on display at the Genga show.

I love how they arranged the massive amounts of art.

Also they put this circular crater into the wall suggesting the effects of psychic powers in Akira as well as the Earthquake's effects on Japan.

Drew Friedman, the super-talented illustrator who worked for Topps and illustrated the Toxic High cards, Howard Stern's Private Parts book, and draws Tor Johnson and Rondo Hatton a lot has a show coming up at the Scott Eder gallery in Brooklyn. Check it out.

Last week I announced an unofficial contest in which contestants had to draw an X-rated vision of Hell for the chance to win copies of a poster that Johnny Ryan drew. Here we are a week later and this is what we've got to show for it.

This entry shows Randy Savage as some sort of big-dicked lord of the underworld and was drawn by none other than Christian Blunda of the Mean Jeans whose video we just premiered.

This image is by Zach Fleisher and is called "Face Scraper."

This is by Superdaimos Gueverra and is called "Pestilence."

Sean McOmber submitted a drawing called PENISHELL which he drew on a handout from a college professor detailing attendance guidelines. Drawing on school handouts wins big points.

Miguelito Marinez drew a bunch of stuff that looks heavily inspired by Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." You can see the rest of the images in this series on his Flickr page. They're two giant images and are extremely fucking raw to look at.

You have to go to his Flickr page to check out some detail shots but the bouncy castle on top of the giant skull was a highlight.

The final entrant is Marc J. Palm whose entry is definitely the most horrible to look at.

All of the entries were pretty amateurishly drawn and I am certain that a couple of them were not actually drawn for this contest but I have to pick two winners and so they are Sean McOmber and Christian Blunda. Weeeeeee!

I'd like to leave you with another image drawn by Moebius, to remind you what good drawings look like.

Previously - Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #53

Follow me on Instagram at "nickgazin" and Twitter at @NicholasGazin