All My Bones Are Collar Bones
2015
Rupert in Providence (24 pages)
Rupert in Providence: the Understudy (3 pages)
2016
An Evening’s Time with HP Lovecat (8 pages)
2017
Rupert Bear & HP Lovecat: Fugue State of the Nation (7 pages)
Rupert Bear & HP Lovecat: Rupert’s Big Test (8 pages, in progress)
Exploiting the public domain for fun and profit has been an interest of mine for a few years now, and I recently re-released the Gods of Pegana, a foundational work of modern fantasy by Lord Dunsany and Sidney Sime, newly colored.
It’s fucking dope and I’m proud as hell. I have not yet translated my pride into a marketing strategy… if you’re a smart business person, please get in contact in with me. There’s gold in these fingers.
Perhaps one of the greatest commercials of all time, the Baltimore Sun’s literacy campaign, Reading by 9, reached out to real nine year olds, and filmed them running around Fort McHenry. They gave us a lot of candy.
The children were a mix of students from the Waldorf School of Baltimore, where I attended, and the exceptionally more basic institution of Roland Park Elementary. Upon the first day of filming, the lead role had not yet been assigned, so they shot footage with me and a kid from Roland Park switching out.
When they finally chose me to be the face of the campaign, they moved the other kid to the back of the group. You can’t really see him in the commercial.
On day two, I wore a pair of black sneakers, as opposed to the white ones we started with. It ruined the first quarter of the shoot and everyone was pissed. They probably shouldn’t have left continuity up to the nine year old, though.
A year and a half later, after I left Waldorf (too expensive, even for a TV star), I actually shadowed at Roland Park for a day. Everyone from the film shoot was there, and remembered me. My competitor explained to me that they only chose me because I was more believably illiterate.
I did not end up attending Roland Park Elementary.
Credits, from Adweek’s “Best of” 1998:
Charles Street Films…….. Production Statement
Crushing Underground…….. Music (Misc. Credits)
Allan Charles…….. Director
Rob Schnapp…….. Creative Director
Keith Quesenberry…….. Copywriter
Kenny Klompus…….. Editor
This is a dumb video that went viral – when it was posted on reddit, I only had a clip, which racked up the majority of views over on vimeo.
My mom had been on the morning news before, and did a bellydancing lesson with the morning news host. The next time they invited her on, she decided to do a lesson not with the host, but with myself as her student instead.
I have never bellydanced before.
As you can see in the following clip, at no point does a “lesson” begin. She showed me a move with the sword ahead of time that I fail to demonstrate when prompted. Then, the studio throws to music, and you can watch me panic and make up a dance, on live television.
I was hugely embarrassed, and although I posted the video online, I did not give the backstory. A couple years later, bored, I posted it to reddit with the full story (first to /r/cringe, then after some encouragement, to greater visibility in /r/videos). It spent two days the front page, and now whenever I post on reddit someone says “hey, you’re the bellydancing guy!”
During my tenure at Purchase TV, one of the US’s very last analog stations, I produced a myriad of hastily thrown together cartoons in a variety of styles, spending no more than two days on any of them.
The Storybook Pictureshow was a series of mostly animatic watercolored fairy tales, which were favorably received by our audience of over a dozen students. Although there were a total of six episodes, the first 3-part arc is the highlight of the series (poorly mixed audio aside).
Perhaps it should be noted here that parts one and two were originally intended to be independent stories, but it was hard not to draw connections between them when creating part three.
I was pretty happy with the conclusion of the story, but my Friend and personal character foil Jamie Demarco insisted that I continue the tale, for Little Bird’s sake. I agreed, and at some point, I plan to do exactly that (but I don’t know how thrilled Jamie’s going to be about where it goes from here).
American Eldritch was an idea I had not long out of college, while trying to figure out how to keep making cool stuff with friends in the absence of an environment that encourages it. The original plan for a regular magazine did not take off, because it’s hard enough just to be alive sometimes. A second issue is an ongoing project nonetheless.
Some highlights of this issue include D. Edward Calhoun’s Memory, based on the artist’s memory of the HP Lovecraft story, Memory, and a few selections from Jackson Wingate’s No Yorker cartoons, a complete selection of which can be found here.
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This was a story a I did for a small zine that D. Calhoun and I passed out at Baltimore Comicon 2013. I awkwardly handed a copy to Mike Mignola right after his panel where he confessed that he doesn’t really read comics anymore, and just has an ever growing stack next to his desk. But, he took it anyway. Did it go on the stack?? I can only hope. Anyway, Iron Henry is part of a larger story about the moral gray areas of occult pediatrics, but this seven pager holds its own as a short weird YA vignette.
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I’ve been interested in William Blake for a long time (ever since that nun referred to him as a “dangerous thinker”), but only recently have I really delved into what makes Blake such a powerhouse of revolutionary art. He was a prophet of the Weird, and beholden to no one; he wrote, illustrated and printed all his own work by hand. What a neat guy. He died in relative obscurity, but thanks to the curiosity of William Butler Yeats, he achieved fame posthumously, and is now recognized as one of the most influential Brits to walk upon Albion’s rocky shores.
From the description I wrote for Amazon: “This volume of premium cosmic horror contains a high-quality facsimile edition of William Blake’s original handwritten masterpiece, an introduction by Aladdin Collar, a plain-text companion of the poems, and a diagrammatic interpretation of Blake’s unique pantheon of gods.” (X)
On July 4th, 2015, The American Eldritch Society for the Preservation of Hearsay and Rumor launched the first issue of their ongoing journal, American Eldritch, in which artists and writers of the past and present mingle between pages of mystery, horror, humor and intrigue.
I edited and published the volume, in addition to designing it. Also, I am five of the of the 18 purported contributors. You can buy it here, if you’re into that sort of thing.