Dustin Parker's Monster Mania

When I’m drawing on my iPad, I can zoom in 3200%, and get lost in the quantum realm. When I’m working on a Monster Mania drawing, I can easily become obsessed with all of the tiny little details and forget to “see” the whole drawing.  With a painting, you can step back 10 or 20 feet and study the painting from a distance. From a distance you can see the painting fully. You ask yourself a dozen questions. Are all of those little details working together in harmony? Does the painting guide the eye the way you intended? Does the painting evoke the desired emotional response? After you finish asking all of the questions, you respond with more painting. You repeat this process over and over again until the painting reaches a conclusion.  When I’m coloring a new Monster Mania drawing, I will often display the drawing on my computer screen and I will stare at the drawing from the comfort of my bed. I’ve found this is the best way for me to achieve that distance, and see the drawing o...

This is my version of the evil teddy bear. It seems like murderous toys are always pretending to be ordinary happy-go-lucky toys. They hide among the Care Bears and Cabbage Patch Kids and Pound Puppies. I liked the idea of a monster that is pretending to be a toy. The monster is wearing the pelt of a teddy bear as a disguise. The teddy bear is bursting at the seams, revealing bits and pieces of the monster inside. I imagine this creature in hiding in a dark closet waiting for the perfect time to devour the children and pets.   

When I was a child I was obsessed with Dinosaurs.  I filled dozens of spiral notebooks with ballpoint pen drawings of my favorite dinosaurs. One of my favorite books was “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs” written by Dr. David Norman and illustrated by John Sibbick. I would copy Sibbick’s illustrations over and over and over again. That book never left my sight. I had a Fisher-Price PXL2000 video camera and I would make dinosaur documentaries with my plastic dinosaur toys. I used my mom’s red nail polish to paint battle wounds on my Dinosaur toys. Sometimes the Dinosaurs would fight my Gobots and Ninja Turtles. I was inspired by Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien’s stop motion animated dinosaur sequence from “The Animal World” documentary. I wanted to make my own dinosaur movies.  I also had 3 giant inflatable dinosaurs and I would battle with them using my incredible wrestling moves. I also had dozens of wooden dinosaur skeleton model puzzles. I ate Chef Boyardee's Di...

The mouth is gluttonous. The mouth stutters and spits. The mouth spreads lies. The mouth vomits vitriol. The mouth is a megaphone for hate. The mouth exudes the stench of death. The mouth is full of rotten teeth and rotten thoughts. The mouth shouts incoherent babble. The mouth spreads fear and disease with every breath. The mouth infects minds and curses souls. The mouth is a portal to hell. 

You’ve been sick for 5 days. Your throat is full of razors. Your face is full of snot. You can’t breathe. Every muscle hurts. Your skeleton feels like spaghetti. You’re covered with perspiration and crusty boogers. You’re alternating between freezing to death and burning alive. Your head feels like it has been hit with one hundred hammers. You’ve never been this close to death.  Suddenly, you sneeze the biggest sneeze that has ever been sneezed. You look at your hand, and find this big ball of wet gooey mucus staring back at you. Suddenly you can smell things that have never been smelled. You feel euphoric. You feel powerful. You’ve never felt more alive. 

When I was 11 years old, I experienced an awakening. The first time I laid my eyes on a Todd McFarlane comic was a religious experience, and I have been a devout worshipper of Todd’s artwork ever since. Todd has always been one of my favorite comic book artists and his work is a big influence on my Monster Mania drawings.  The idea to draw a Rutabaga Man came directly from Todd.  The voice in my head said, “Hey Bud, You should draw a Rutabaga Man. The Rutabaga was planted in my brain because I’ve read, watched and listened to countless interviews with Todd, and he often uses Rutabaga Man as a hypothetical character when talking about the importance of creating and owning your own characters. Todd saying Rutabaga Man gave me a chuckle and it stuck in my brain. 

The Monster Mania color palette is heavily inspired by the vacuform plastic Halloween masks that Ben Cooper, Inc. and Collegeville Costumes manufactured in the 70s and 80s. The masks had really garish colors like Neon Green, Fluorescent Pink, Safety Orange and Chartreuse. I think the bright colors, crude design, blank expressions and sloppy paint application made the masks super creepy. I really love the juxtaposition of bright happy colors with creepy horror imagery.   

The majority of the monsters in the Monster Mania series are original characters, but the series also features several public domain monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster. I enjoy creating my own characters, but sometimes it is fun to draw established characters.  I wanted to take a meat and potatoes approach to Dracula and serve up something familiar. I wanted to draw a classic Dracula that was reminiscent of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. The green skin was inspired by a Collegeville Costumes Vampire Mask. 

When I started working on the Monster Mania series, I wasn’t expecting the series to continue beyond the first 10 drawings. I just wanted to draw some cool monsters for a Halloween themed art exhibition. I also never intended for the original Monster Mania logo to be anything more than a cool type treatment on a promotional flyer. It was just a tiny little graphic on a postcard that I quickly cobbled together in Adobe Photoshop.  It took me a few years, but I finally got around to designing a new Monster Mania logo. The new logo takes some inspiration from the original logo. I kept the big googly eye and the drippy / scratchy text for Mania. I wanted the logo to have the same vibe as the original Garbage Pail Kids Logo and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles logo from the original 1987 animated series. I wanted the new Monster Mania logo to invoke that same feeling. I was trying to capture the joyful weirdness of my childhood. I also took some inspiration from Matthew Allison’s logo t...