Hey, comic fans, it’s time to promote an upcoming project involving one of the StarWarp Concepts crew!
Available for preorder right now from online retailers and your local comic shops is Morbius Epic Collection: The End of a Living Vampire, a Marvel Comics trade paperback collection of the late ’70s/early ’80s adventures of the scientifically created vampire who made his debut in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man #101. Scheduled for release in May and featuring stories by writers Doug Moench, Bill Mantlo, David Anthony Kraft, it’s part of Marvel’s promotional push for the upcoming Morbius film from Sony Pictures, starring Jared Leto (Suicide Squad) as the Living Vampire, Tyrese Gibson (the Fast and the Furious franchise), and Matt Smith (the 11th Doctor Who).
And while that’s a spiffy reproduced front cover by the late, great Gil Kane and inker Dan Adkins, what’s got our interest is the back cover: a reproduction of the cover art from the June 1975 Vampire Tales Annual #1, painted by our friend Bob Larkin!
For StarWarp Concepts, Bob has provided cover paintings for my Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign, and also did the frontispiece illustration for my latest book, the nonfiction comics history From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures. Outside of SWC, Bob painted the covers for my X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy novels, back in the early 2000s.
It’s not just his painting skills that are impressive—Bob’s also one hell of a pencil artist, as you’ll see if you order a copy of SWC’s The Bob Larkin Sketchbook. It’s 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 islittle that he hasn’t painted. And the sketchbook 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!
The Bob Larkin Sketchbook is available in print and digital formats. Visit its product page for ordering information, as well as sample pages.
And to see more of Bob’s stunning work, pay a visit to his art blog, Bob Larkin: The Illustrated Man.
