This Island Earth

I watched quite a lot of American B-movies when I was a kid. One that always stayed with me was This Island Earth starring Jeff Morrow as Exeter, an alien who has come to Earth to recruit human scientists to aid his people, the Metalunans, in their war against the evil Zagons.

While hardly subtle (especially in the final third where the protagonists head to Metaluna) at its best the film has a genuinely weird quality that borders on the surreal. Exeter himself is an interestingly compromised figure torn between his desire to save his planet and repulsion at the inhumanity shown by his fellow Metalunans towards the human scientists he has kidnapped.

I've been doodling the character recently and these are some of the sketches I've come up with - drawn over a period of about 6 months or so (which explains the slight variations in style).

My Left Foot

The Specialist

In a second-hand bookshop, some years back, I came across a really interesting book called The Specialist by Charles Sale. It’s a short monologue by the specialist of the title – a carpenter named Lem Putt, whose speciality is building outhouses in Urbana, Illinois in the early part of last century.

It was apparently very popular at the time and Sale himself was a successful vaudevillian and actor but what initially attracted me to it were the lovely linocut illustrations by William Kermode.

It’s a lovely little book, warm, witty and wise, with some very handy hints on outhouse construction should the need arise…