Holy Close Encounters of the Third Kind! It’s Roy Neary’s favorite holiday, as you can see in this iconic cover painting that our friend, legendary artist Bob Larkin, did for Marvel Comics’ comic book adaptation of CE3K, back in 1978.
According to the site There Is a Day for That, World UFO Day was launched in 2001 by UFO hunter Haktan Akdogan and “is observed and celebrated on July 2nd every year to raise awareness about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and alien life forms. The day aims to discuss and educate people about UFOs, flying saucers, and sightings of bright blue light in the sky that make headlines across the world.”
True story: When Bob was commissioned by Marvel to do the CE3K cover painting, the notes he was given described the main characters, Roy Neary and Jillian Guiler (played respectively by Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon), running away in fright from the approaching UFO. But shortly after he delivered the painting, he received a call from the comic’s writer/editor, Archie Goodwin, who explained that Steven Spielberg had rejected the art because Roy and Jillian were supposed to be running toward the UFO.
Since this was long before the days of Photoshop, the art couldn’t just be reconfigured with replacement foreground figures, so Bob hurried to his studio and created a completely new painting—the one you see here—in 24 hours!
But it’s not just his painting skills that are impressive—Bob’s also one hell of a pencil artist, as evidenced by his work in a couple of SWC projects (cue the sales pitch!).
The Bob Larkin Sketchbook is a collection of some of Bob’s incredible pencil drawings, and what you’ll discover when you see them is how wide-ranging his subjects are. Sci-fi, horror, Westerns, pulp adventure, crime fiction, movie merchandise, even wrestling stars—as we say on the book’s back cover, there really is little that he hasn’t painted.
The sketchbook also features three pieces created especially for it: the Pandora Zwieback cover art; a portrait of Patricia Savage, the fightin’ cousin of pulp fiction’s top-tier adventurer, Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze; and a two-page spread in which Doc faces off against another Golden Age crimefighter—The Shadow!
Bob also provides a great frontispiece illustration for From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures, by Steven A. Roman (that’s me!). It’s a nonfiction history that takes an extensive look at the queen of comic book bad girls, from the debut of her series in 1969 to the death of Warren Publishing in 1983, featuring an in-depth guide to all her Warren stories; a checklist of all her Warren appearances; an overview of the six novelizations by pulp sci-fi author Ron Goulart that were published in the 1970s by Warner Books; the story behind the rise and fall of Hammer Films’ proposed Vampi movie of the 1970s that was meant to star Playboy model Barbara Leigh and horror icon Peter Cushing—along with a peek at Peter Cushing’s personal copy of the ’70s Vampirella screenplay; and a look at the awful 1996 direct-to-cable-TV movie that was made, starring Talisa Soto as Vampirella and rock god Roger Daltrey as Dracula. There’s also a foreword by Official Vampirella Historian Sean Fernald, and photographs from the personal archives of Vampi’s cocreator (and creator/editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland), Forrest J Ackerman.
The Bob Larkin Sketchbook and From the Stars…a Vampiress are available in print and digital formats. Visit their respective product pages for ordering information.
