Dune (1984) - Charles Atlas Ad Parody

 Dune (1984)
Charles Atlas Ad Parody

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This end cap to the "Dune (1984)" Series took an embarrassing amount of time to finish for some reason, but here it is, FINALLY!  To give a peak behind the curtain and show "Where do you get your ideas?", it was such an odd, circuitous, and random chain of events that lead to "Ding!  I got it..." that I figured it would be mildly amusing to share.

For the past few years, I have been regularly submiting to "Moss Piglet", a small art magazine out of Kenosha, Wisconsin, published by my pal (and Superman's), John Bloner.  Each month, they have a prompt for submissions and a couple months ago, it was for "Beaches".  While my submission was OK, I was semi-disappointed in myself (it was done as a beach and see done as faux-astronomical analog: beachball as the moon, jellyfish as shooting star, starfish as stars, etc.).  Not bad, but, well, not all that good, either, IMHO and somewhat disappointing on a personal level.  It made it on the back cover, so it wasn't terrible or anything like that, I guess.

Originally, though, I kept trying to come up with some sort of parody of the Charles Atlas Ad to submit, as I found idea personally amusing in my nerdy way:

The Original Charles Atlas Ad (well, one of them...)

But, every time I was trying to think of something, the pull of Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol's Flex Mentallo, which was already a masterful parody of Charles Atlas, was a bit too strong, and I kept referring to Flex Mentallo in my head.  After trying and failing to come up with something, I gave up and just did the "As Above, So Below/Outer Space as Beach" visual comparison and left it at that.  After the deadline was done and everything was prepped to be sent off to the publisher, John B. mentioned that he was enjoying the "Dune (1984)" series on my Blog and it was too bad no one had made a "Dune" submission for the "Beaches" prompt.

As soon as he mentioned "Dune (1984)" in the context of the "Beaches" prompt, it immediately slotted into the Charles Atlas Parody I was trying to come up with and I saw Feyd kicking sand in Paul and Chani's face (Ding!); Paul saying he was going to gamble a stamp on the Bene Gesserit for the Gom Jabbar (Ding!); and Paul stabbing Feyd with a Crysknife (Ding!).  Suddenly, I had a framework and most of it immediately fell into place from that one little phrase, with only a few remaining square pegs to be hammered into the round holes remaining.

So I have to give him a tip o' the digital pen to John Bloner for unknowingly inspiring this Post (well, it would be unknowingly, if I didn't blab to him how I was immediately stealing that idea).

Anyhoo, it amused me and is a melange (pun intended) of the movie and book--and, yeah, I intentionally left off "Book" from "As seen on TV and Movies" as I thought it was funny to be pretend it can only be represented by Movies and TV Shows, even though the first "Dune" book is among my favorite books (I do like some of the ideas explored in the rest of the series as written by Frank Herbert, but as they were actually carried out, they were very good, but not as great as the first book, IMHO).

Now, off to figure out what the H-E-Double Hockey Sticks I'm gonna do for the "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween" coming up in October.  Eesh, it's already almost here and I have several other projects unrelated to this Blog to get done, first.  Hoo-boy...  No rest for the wicked and, apparently, I've been a baaaadddd boy!

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STEP ONE:  Here are the digital pencils done on a 3,300px x 5,100px / 11" x 17" @ 300dpi cavas in Clip Studio Paint.  At the time I pencilled it, I still wasn't too sure what all I was going to include in the two middle word balloons (something-something Gom Jabbar, something-something "Sleeper has awakened", etc.), so I just left those blank for the time being and moved on to the Inking portion of the drawing.  Originally, I was gonna do "Hero of the Desert", but referring back to "Hero of the Beach" seemed more fitting to me.

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STEP TWO: And here are the digital inks and letters.

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STEP THREE:  And here is the final image, with lots of various color layers and did a color halftone of the color plate, which I overlayed at 30% opacity.  I also threw a paper texture over top just to complete the old tyme comic book feel.

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Done digitally with Clip Studio Paint.

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Shameless Self-Promotion: One-Million Views?

Self-Promotion:
One Million-to-John

Before starting with the boring Blog stuff, just to explain the image, I've always been a fan of "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension" (1984) and was thinking about doing a series for that in the near future.  So, I was primed for something Buckaroo Banzai-related and thought about the infamous Watermelon scene with Reno (Pepe Serna) and New Jersey (Jeff Goldblum).  And, yeah, I know New Jersey isn't wearing his cowboy hat in the scene, but it made it easier to identify him from "Buckaroo Banzai".  Well, I mean, for those of us that are into some of the more weird, cult movies from the 80's.  This is one of those "If you know, you know" type posts.

On to the regularly unscheduled program: OK, this is weird...  While I do check my views semi-regularly, I really don't pay them much attention, aside from "Oh, hey, that one was surprisingly popular" (the word "popular" is doing a lot of lifting), or "Oh, that thing I thought would knock everyone's socks off went nowhere."  C'est la Vie.  But, I am no way a slave to the Algorithm and don't bother too much one way or the other, for better or worse.  I'm accustomed to my current level of mediocrity, I suppose.

But, like watching the calendar on your computer roll over to a new year, or your car's odometer get to 100,000 miles, or some similar numerical milestone, I did the same when it came to this Blog.  I noticed it was probably a few days from 1,000,000 views, so I checked a little more often just to see if I could watch it roll over.  Oddly, it worked out and I watched it tick up throughout the evening from 999,457 to 999,999 to 1,000,000.  Ah, that OCD dopamine reward!

This is the 15th year I've been doing this Blog, and I've been doing my Figure Drawing one for 16 years, and both of them just crossed the 1,000,000 Views within a few weeks of each other, so that's very strange.  Why, it seems like it was only yesterday when I was celebrating 100,000 views (actually, it was about 9 years ago in Feb. 2017).  The thought of 1,000,000 views on either one of my Blogs--let along both--is mind boggling and somewhat humbling.  What can I say, I'm a man of modest needs.

I noticed a large jump on the number of views and visits to this Blog starting in early 2025 about when I dropped the series of "Tron" digital paintings, and things jumped again the past few months in 2026.  While it is nice to think the growth of the Blog is people finally coming around and recognizing my (cough) genius, I'm sure it is mostly due to scraping from A.I. Bots and whatnot.  Nothing has really changed as far as I can tell, just "Number go up".  Shrug.

Random bit of oddness: Of all the stuff I've done the past couple years when things really picked up, while there are many close runners-up, the most popular post so far was for Super-Grover.  Huh.  While I find it amusing and am not entirely displeased about it, I will admit to be somewhat surprised about that.  I mean, it isn't even all that good of a Super-Grover digital painting and probably one I should have done traditionally, IMHO.  Ah, well.

Anyhoo, I'll rub some Preparation H on my head to reduce the swelling from crossing the threshold of 1,000,000 views and get back to trying to figure out what I will be doing next.  Speaking of, I should be dropping the last of the "Dune (1984)" series in a few days, and desperately trying to figure out what I will be doing for "31 Days of HELL-O-Ween".  I've grown a bit bored with painting still frames from various Horror Movies, although they are fun practice to work on some painting skills.  So, we'll see what happens with that.  Something... different, I hope.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by to gawk at my humble Blog--even if it is just in the same manner people rubber-neck at a car wreck.  It is all greatly appreciated!

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STEP ONE:  Here are the digital pencils done on a 2,000px x 2,250px @ 300dpi.

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STEP TWO: And here are the digital inks.

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STEP THREE:  And here is the final image.  I kept the colors relatively flat, but put a paper texture over top.

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Done digitally with Clip Studio Paint.

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