Hello, BOILs, GHOULS, and non-SPINEary pals! You’ve picked up the latest print of Shriek and Spew! the (fictional) comic magazine designed to spoil your young mind, and then… Your dinner! Ehhh heheheheheheee! Today’s story is about a wealthy man plagued by a horde of the undead. His name? Count Dracula! *thunder crash*”

Behind the SCREAMS!

Shriek and Spew is a Horror Comic concept based on Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror. This started as a piece I created as part of the Ghost Shrimp Workshop in 2021 for the theme of Nightmare World. It sat unfinished in a folder for about a year until I started writing horror comics in earnest in 2022. I wanted to develop a technique referential to actual old horror comics with a bit more texture than my usual style. I found a great brush set called Duplitone by RetroSupply and it happened to be Black Friday so I snagged a set and decided to finish this piece to develop a system before I started illustrating a full comic project.

Brains of Dracula is not really intended to be developed into a full comic, but as a horror fanatic, I do love the idea of a story that pits Dracula against a horde of zombies. In an episode of Show Me The Meaning host Austin Hayden mentioned Vampires are considered the Monster to the Proletariat and working class, a wealthy individual taking your life or enslaving you. But Zombies are a monster story to the ruling class as they are symbolic of a massive union movement. When prompted to come up with an idea for a nightmare world I started thinking about my own anxieties around class division and this idea sprang to mind. The course had kind of a hyper-creativity element to it so I didn’t overthink it but you may find traces of that thought process in the illustration. The personal mythology as well as the overworld and underworld idea that Dan Bandit encouraged us to explore.

I also decided to try out a parallax effect on this piece to emphasise the planes of storytelling. It’s something I’d like to play around with more in the future.