To celebrate today’s release of Halloween Ends—the highly anticipated conclusion to the Jamie Lee Curtis–starring trilogy that began with 2018’s Halloween and continued with 2021’s Halloween Kills—we’ve dipped into the Bob Larkin Archives to present this haunting image: an ad Bob painted for TV Guide in 1981, for the NBC broadcast premiere of the original John Carpenter film from 1978. Bob still has the painting in his collection, and pointed out that, for the print ad, the knife he’d put in Michael Myers’s hand was edited out by the magazine staff. It’s still a creepy image anyway!
If you’re a fan of comic books, or movies, or pulp fiction heroes, Bob Larkin is a painter whose work you recognize immediately; he’s provided covers and movie posters for just about every publishing house and film studio for more than four decades. Doc Savage, Dazzler, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, Planet of the Apes, Piranha, and Night of the Creeps are just some of the painted images you’re already familiar with, even if you didn’t know they were Larkin’s work. He’s been an inspiration to artists like Joe Jusko and Alex Ross. If you’re a Panatic, then you know him as the cover artist of the Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign. He also provided the frontispiece for my nonfiction comics history, From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures.
But it’s not just his cover 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 is little 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 and From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures are available in print and digital formats. Visit their respective product pages for ordering information.
And to see more of Bob’s stunning work, pay a visit to his art blog, Bob Larkin: The Illustrated Man.
