The Warrior of the Graphic Wasteland.With the intricate detail of a seasoned illustrator our latest Monster Maker, Jimmy Giegerich, is a master of the macho meat puppet... okay that came out wrong, but nonetheless his work exudes high levels of textured, inflatable mounds of ass-kicking testosterone.Tell us a little about yourself. Who is Jimmy Giegerich??
Titans of physical prowess battle gruesome beasts as flesh tears, eyes are gouged and the consistency of blood becomes synonymous with vomit and motor oil all set to a cinematic score by GWAR. Welcome to the Wasteland.
I'm a 23 year old Illustrator living in Baltimore, Maryland. I spend way too much money on horror movies, videogames, and kaiju figures. I like to spend my days drawing pictures of gross things wrecking shit, and listening to massive amounts of speed metal.
You have a distinctively psychedelic underground comix meets Japanese woodblock print style of art, do you have any specific sources of inspiration?I'd say my top illustrators that I take inspiration from are Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Go Nagai (particularly Devilman by him), Frank Frazetta, and Hideshi Hino. I've been looking at Ed Roth and Frazetta since I was a kid, and I started to get into Go Nagai when I first saw the Devilman OAV's when I was in highschool. I got into Hideshi Hino last, probably around college or so. I am also a HUGE crappy movie nerd, and I think that reflects in my work too. I probably wouldn't draw the things that I do and the way that I do if it weren't for movies like Dead Alive, Street Trash, or Lone Wolf and Cub.
A lot of the way that I draw comes from when I was a kid too. I was obsessed with monsters (both from movies, as well as "real" ones like Bigfoot and Mothman) and super heroes/villians, and I used to love cartoons like Thundercats and He-Man and was waaay into videogames. I remember the first time a videogame absolutely blew me away was when I saw and played Mortal Kombat in the arcades when it came out. Up until then I played nothing but Street Fighter II, which I loved immensely, but as a 5 year old I had never seen anything so visceral and shocking as Mortal Kombat. As a result, I started drawing nothing but characters from Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter fighting Dinosaurs, Monsters, and the X-men in my daily journal in elementary school.
What kind of tools do you use to create your work?
I usually draw everything out and ink it by hand, and then scan it in and color it with photoshop. I like to use a lot of hand made textures and stuff too. I actually have no idea how to use photoshop for anything other than coloring my stuff and
photoshopping my face into pictures of people with parasitic twins.
When you begin to lay out a sequential narrative, do you work off a script or does it evolve as you go?
I usually like to attack things head on and just start drawing. I always have a general idea of what I want to do with a narrative, and if it looks like it's going to be a longer one I'll get a loose outline going, but I mostly like to see where it
goes in my sketches first, before finalizing things.
You've participated a couple times over at the Covered blog, did you have a favorite comic as a kid?I was really, really into comics when I was a kid. I remember getting 5 bucks allowance every once in a while, and being so psyched at the though of how many comics I could get out of the "10 cent comics" box with it. I loved the standards like X-men and Captain America, but my absolute top 3 favorite comic series' were Doom Patrol (the 1987 series), Sergio Aragonés' Groo The Wanderer, and anything with Ghost Rider in it. My favorite single issue as a kid was The Punisher: War Journal #58, specifically because it was an issue were Ghost Rider, the Punisher, and Daredevil basically went around blowing shit up, shooting people, and setting things on fire. Plus there was a bad guy with a hairlip and snaggle teeth. I had/have no idea what the story arc of that comic was, what happened in the issue before or after it, or who most of any of the other characters were, but I loved it anyway.
You've at least experimented with animation in Barf-Melt and your website logo, are there any plans for a short based on your work in the near future?
It's funny, when I graduated from college, the one thing I regretted was that I never took an animation course. I mostly didn't ever take one because they were so damn hard to get into if you weren't an animation major. It's one of my goals to learn to
animate things better (or learn to animate in general for that matter), so who knows? Maybe one day...
What kind of cartoons did you watch as a kid? Anything you weren't allowed to watch?
I was a huge fan of stuff like Masters of the Universe, Thundercats, G-force (aka Battle of the Planets/Gatchaman), Silverhawks (which was kind of just a combination of Thundercats and G-Force anyway), the Swamp Thing cartoon, etc. I was also all over anything with Dinosaurs in it too, like Dinosausers and Dino Riders. As I got older and stuff like Ren and Stimpy came out I couldn't get enough of it. As far as things that I wasn't allowed to watch (but tried my hardest to anway), Beavis and Butthead was definitely at the top of the list. Oddly enough, I wasn't allowed to watch G.I. Joe as a kid either. According to my mom there was too much shooting and "too many hoochies with their boobs out".
What's the biggest offense to your retina, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987) or a game of Severed Penis Toss as depicted in Street Trash?
Oh man, the severed penis scene from Street Trash is priceless. Every single part of Street Trash is simultaniously horrifying and hysterical at the same time. I've seen that movie a thousand times, and it's one of the few movies that I know so well, and still feel like I could use a shower after watching. I love that there are so many scenes in that movie where you can't help but ask yourself, "Are these people acting or are they this way in real life?"
Several of your works consist of severed limbs, eye gouging or blatant deconstruction of the human form. Is there an intentional theme of violence going on there and where does that interest originate?
This is probably another aspect of my work that stemmed from when I was a kid. To put it plainly, I was a huge wuss when I was younger. Literally everything scared the crap out of me. I remember going to the video store with my dad when I was young, and sneaking off to look at the Horror movies. Just looking at the boxes of the movies scared the living daylights out of me, and I remember having this strange feeling of terror and excitement at what could possibly be on those tapes. In contrast to my mom saying that G.I. Joe was too violent, my dad used to have me watch pretty much whatever with him. The three movies that really sparked my interest in violent content as a child were An American Werewolf in London, Jaws, and the remake of The Blob. All three movies made me feel both terrified and fascinated at the same time. I started finding that the best way to stop being scarred of things like that was to take it and turn it into something that I found funny. When I draw things like someone getting an axe stuck in their face, I like to draw it with an equal interest in the grotesque and the funny aspects of the situation.
It's the same way with how much I draw people vomiting in my illustrations. I am absolutely horrified of vomiting myself, for whatever reason, and yet I love to draw people projectile vomiting. I'm not bothered when other people vomit, but I'm mortified of vomiting myself... to the point where I've kept a record of how long it's been since I last vomited. 11 years and counting!
As a fan of horror what are your top 5 favorite movie monsters?
I'd have to say that my 5 favorites are, in no particular order:
- Tarman from Return of the Living Dead: I just love everything about this guy. He's goopy, he's ridiculously cool looking, and the way he moves is unbelievable. One of my favorite costumes in a movie ever.
- Hedorah from Godzilla vs the Smog Monster: Hedorah has the distinction of being one of the coolest Godzilla villians, while being from one of the crappiest movies in the series.
- The Rancor from Return of the Jedi: I'm pretty sure every kid who saw the Rancor for the first time thought that they were literally looking at the coolest thing they had ever seen in their life. I'm also pretty sure I cried along with Malakili (the Rancor's trainer) when I saw the Rancor die for the first time.
- The Thing from John Carpenter's The Thing: I know that this one is kind of cheating, since there's so many different monsters that this encompasses in the movie, but it's just too cool of a monster to not give it it's cred.
- Michael (played by Peter Bark) from Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror: I have to put him on here because he's such a bizarre character, and played buy such a bizarre actor. This is also one my absolute favorite movies of all time too. Plus he bites his
mom's nipple off at the end of the movie.
Who gives the most bad ass beat down – Conan or Kenshiro (Fist of the North Star)?Jeez man, that's a tough one. While Kenshiro's beatings have such style and flash, and also make peoples head's explode, I really love the way that Conan has no reservations about jumping on someone and sticking his thumbs in their eyes. Shit. This is a tough one... I'm going to have to give it to Kenshiro though, if only for "Watatatatata-TAH!"
True that. Do you currently have any special projects in the pipeline for 2010?
I have a couple of projects on the horizon that I'm really psyched about. I'm planning on doing a series based around every character from the various cartoon, tv, and comic series' that I desperately wanted an action figure of, but never got as a kid. A handful of the guys who I know I'm going to be drawing are characters like Slithe from Thundercats, either Buzzsaw or Monstar from Silverhawks, Hawk and Animal from WWF's The Legion of Doom, and Metlar from the Inhumanoids. I'm planning on turning those guys into screen prints.
I have a couple of comic projects on the horizon too. I haven't done much comic work lately, so I'm really pumped about these. One is a comic about the post apocalypse which'll be written by my friend Adam Hansen out in Minnesota, and the other'll be
written by myself. I've been dying to do something that combines my love of horror comics like Creepy and Tales of Voodoo, Hammer Horror Films, and movies like the remakes of The Thing and The Fly, so the comic written by me will definitely encompass those themes.
Finally, me and my good friend and fellow Baltimore Illustrator Daniel Krall have also been talking about doing a series of illustrations where we combine two of our favorite things: hot chicks and stitched-up piles of monster meat. He'll draw the hot chicks, I'll draw the monster meat.
Before we say goodbye, what's the strangest thing you remember doing as a kid?
Sometimes when I was a kid, after going to the bathroom, I would wrap myself up in toilet paper and pretend I was a mummy who worked for the Ghost Busters. I would take the aerosol air freshener, which I pretended was my proton laser, and run around the bathroom spraying everything in sight, pretending that they were ghosts. I would then take off the toilet paper, and wipe all the aerosol spray off everything with it, and walk out like nothing happened. For a while there, this was routine.
Want to know more about the Warrior? For all things Jimmy, be sure to check out his blog and his official portfolio online.
0 comments:
Post a Comment