Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Dick Monster, Clans of the Alphane Moon



This was one of the last of my Philip Dick illustrations, and by the time I reached this one my mind was plenty f**ked up. "Clans of the Alphane Moon," originally published in 1964, used the trope of "inmates take over the asylum" to represent a planet of loonies. Each type of insane person formed different "clans," such as the paranoids, the obsessive-compulsives, the maniacs, the depressives, or the completely psychotic. The clans worked together, using their insane "talents" to build extraterrestrial colonies. Among the characters in the book was a slime monster alien, called "Lord Running Clam." There's also an unctuous android and a young girl with giant artificial boobs. You can see my concept of the alien in the lower left corner. If you look closely, you can see that this monster is built from a large phallus, surrounded by growths, boils, nipples, and tentacles. Sweet...doesn't it just wanna make you go and read this book? After that, I was done with Dick, and could get back to my own religious insanity which I was suffering through during 1979 which was probably the worst year of my life so far.

"Clans of the Alphane Moon" is ink on illustration board, 7" x 10", summer 1979, published by Gregg Press, 1979.

2 comments:

Tristan Alexander said...

WOW! Twisted porn from Pyra...
On the other hand, these faces are great, your black and white inked faces are more realistic/less stylized than your painted faces. You complain now that you can't paint people. Well you sure could DRAW people at this time anyway (not that I agree with you on not being able to paint people).

Pyracantha said...

Thanks, Tristan...it's funny, some of my best figure and portrait art come from 20 or even 30 years ago, so what happened to me?
I still hope that I can draw and paint images of beautiful women in revealing costumes. I will try to do this again soon.