The walking dead

Hey guys, just spreading the word here! Aaron Sims, the guy you all love for his amazing work on recent hit movies like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Clash of the Titans (still one of my favorites) has his new Directors site up, where he shows the projects he directed himself. You should definately check out the trailer of his upcoming short Archetype. On the site you will also be able to watch his full short Paralyzed.

Aaron is a character designer or conceptual artist and digital effects artist. He has worked on all the major Hollywood blockbusters of the last two decades. He worked with Rick Bakers Cinovation Studios and Stan Winston. Working with SoftImage and Photoshop, and combining his knowledge of computer technology with his experience as a sculptor made him the lead character designer on Spielbergs Artificial Intelligence, which changed the the industrys design process. He co-created Stan Winston Digital and led the studio, working on films as Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow and Constantine. He now runs the Aaron Sims Company, which worked on films such as The Incredible Hulk and 30 Days of Night. Among his team are Jerad S. Maranz (lead artist), Alex Mandrajiev (concepts/storyboards), Tsvetomir Georgiev (main modeler) and Joel Chang (head environment designer).

Anatomical knowledge, or the study of the structure of the human body, was something quite uncommon, and even forbidden, in the early days of scientific exploration and scholarship, where bloodletting was academically considered as a cure for various deseases. It wasnt until Andreas Vesalius had published his seven volume De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) in 1543, that the human body and its parts were mapped out and their functions described (although still, not always correctly). Today, Vesalius is considered the father of Anatomy and his work, which marked the beginning of modern science, stands as one of the greatest treasures of the Renaissance (it was in fact, one of the most expensive books published at the time, only available to a select few).

Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1514 and was commonly known under his birth name, Andries van Wesel. Of Dutch ancestry, his family originally lived in Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands. His father and grandfather, both named Everard, great-grandfather John and even great-great-grandfather Peter, had all studied medicine at various European Universities and worked for the absolute prominent European aristocrats of the day. Vesalius soon followed the family tradition and studied at the University of Louvain (Leuven), where his great-grandfather taught medicine, the University of Paris, and finally the University of Padua, in Italy, where he became a professor teaching anatomy, something which was traditionally done by disecting monkeys. Vesalius made many drawings of his disections which caught much attention and soon was given the privelege to start disecting executed criminals.

The University of Padua is one of the oldest Universities of Europe, founded in 1222, it was an institute known for its intellectual importance and progressive thinking. It was under the rule of Venice, and it was there that Vesalius would meet Jan Stefan van Kalkar (aka Van Calcar), a German artist who had entered the school of Titian 1536 and would contribute his now famous pen drawings in several of Vesalius  works.

About van Calcars descent: His birthplace Cleves (Kleef) today lies just outside the border of the Netherlands, making him a German artist these days. But at the time of his birth, in 1499, this was not the case. Also remember, illustrations of human anatomy had never been published before that time with such a degree of detail.

In 1537, Vesalius was awarded the title of Doctor of Medicine and Professor of Surgery at the age of merely twenty-three. The next year, their first collaboration provided students with six detailed anatomical illustrations, today known as the Tabulae Anatomicae Sex, which were plagiarised throughout the whole of Europe instantaneously.

The seven volumes of the Fabrica all cover their own territory of the human body. The first book describes the bones and interconnecting ligaments, book two describes all the ligaments and muscles as instruments of voluntary and deliberate motion while the third describes the veins and arteries. Book four goes into the nerves, book five specifically talks about the organs of nutrition and generation (reproduction system) The last volumes, books six and seven, go on to describe the heart and the organs serving the heart (lungs) and finally the Brain and the organs of sense.


Above: beautiful introduction illustration for the title page of Vesalius Fabrica by Jan Van Calcar. Please click to enlarge to its full size. In the middle you can see Vesalius performing a disection amidst a crowd of students and even a pickpocket (on the right).

 The first two books of the Fabrica were completed in 1541. Van Calcars drawings were cut in wood and used for printing by Johannes Oporinus in Basel, Switzerland, the chief publishing center of Europe at that time. Beside the seven volumes of the Fabrica, Vesalius also published the Epitome, a companion piece to the series, which is almost a reprint of the Tabulae, with six chapters and nine illustrations titled Andreae Vesalii suorum de humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome.

Below a collection of the Van Calcars illustrations as published in the Fabrica. Click to enlarge the images to their full size. Below are plates 21, 22 and 23 from the osteologic series from Volume I. Depicted are the anterior, delineation from the side and the anterior of a full human skeleton.


Below, all the major muscle groups indentified in this illustration portraying the posterior surface or backside.




Fabrica reprinted.

In 1555, the Fabrica was reprinted and a second, revised edition was published. Recently, Dr. Gerard Vogrincic, who is a collector of rare books, purchased an original edition of the Fabrica and found that it was full of annotations by the previous owner. Digging up some of the rare handwritten documents of Vesalius on the internet proved his suspicions to be true: The sheer amount of annotations in Latin in his copy were just too much to be of some avid collector.




With the help of Dr. Vivian Nutton, Emeritus Professor at the UCL Center for the History of Medicine, it was proven beyond a doubt that the annotations were written by Vesalius himself for a new, third edition of the Fabrica that unfortunately, was never published. Until now that is! Daniel H. Garrison and Malcolm H. Hast have teamed up with Karger Publishers to create a new version of the Fabrica, in English, celebrating Vesalius 500th aniversary. The book will be published in 2013 and will cost € 1250,00 Euros (Pre-orders will be handled until September of this year). Check here for more information on this new edition or go here for the full exiting personal story of Dr.Vogrincic and his incredible discovery!

The video series is produced by Albert Hughes for Cryteks upcoming shooter, CRYSIS 3, which will be released on February 19th in the US and on February 21 in Europe (by the way, if you pre-order Crysis 3, you get the original first game with it for free (digtal copy), which wasnt available for the Xbox and PS3 at first!). Hughes has directed popular movies like From Hell starring Johnny Depp and Book of Eli with Denzel Washington. Albert worked with the crew at Crytek, and wrote the scripts, did the storyboards and the shot plan for each video that was created, entirely using in-game assets only and their new game engine, the CryEngine 3.

According to Cevat Yerli, C.E.O. at Crytek,The goal with The 7 Wonders of Crysis 3 video series is to reveal the incredible world we have been building for Crysis 3 and to let CryENGINE take center stage to highlight the power of our state-of-the-art game engine. We’ve worked closely with Albert on this project and think that the 7 Wonders series will show the leaps and bounds that Crysis 3 is making over its predecessors.

After almost three decades, this summer will finally bring a new Conan movie to the big screen. ‘Conan the Barbarian’ will star Jason Momoa (Stargate Atlantis) and Ron Perlman (Hellboy), directed by Marcus Nispel, known for his Viking adventure Pathfinder’ (2007). It’s great to see the savage warrior back in the spotlight, fighting his way through hordes of demons, but will it be true to the fiction of Robert E. Howard, author of Conan and many other sword and sorcery’ tales? Time for a flash back!






Weird Tales.

Following Munsey´s success, others publishers tried their hands at pulp magazines, many of which had great success until the depression kicked in. The first issue of ‘Weird Tales’, published by J.C. Henneberger, appeared in March 1923. It ran for 279 issues until September 1954. The magazine’s editor, until his death in 1940 was Farnsworth Wright (1880-1940). Beside Howards fiction, the magazine is famous for publishing stories by master of horror H.P. Lovecraft (‘The call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness’,‘From Beyond’), Robert Bloch (author of ‘Psycho’) and Clark Ashton Smith. Howard was known for his lengthy correspondence with Lovercraft and became part his group of protégé’s, a small enclave of fiction writers who all added to the Cthulhu mythos with their own stories.





 · 1928 August: ‘Red Shadows’
 · 1929 January: ‘Skulls in the Stars’
 · 1929 June: ‘Rattle of Bones’
 · 1930 June/July: ‘The Moon of Skulls’
 · 1930 August: ‘The Hills of the Dead’.
 · 1931 September: ‘The Footfalls Within’.
 · 1932 July: ‘Wings in the Night’.







For this magazine, Howard wrote historical adventures set in the Middle East during the Middle Ages. The last issue of January 1934 carried his short story ‘The Shadow of the Vulture’, which introduced the Ukrainian warrior woman ‘Red Sonya of Rogatino’.

The character wasn’t connected to any Conan story whatsoever. Comic writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith decided to change that when working on their Conan the Barbarian comic series for Marvel in 1973 (Issues 23/24). Spanish artist Esteban Maroto re-designed the character for the first issue of ‘Savage Sword of Conan’, wearing nothing much but a bikini made of metal, which was then adopted by artist John Buscema for his ‘Conan the Barbarian’ series as well (issues 43/44/48).



Above: Re-designing Red Sonja. The premier issue of Savage Sword of Conan sporting a cover by Boris Vallejo (left) and the 44th issue of Conan the Barbarian by John Buscema, both from 1974. The Fiend and the flame continued the afterlings story arc, based on The Tower of Blood, a non-Conan short story by David A. English, published in Witchcraft and Scorcery magazine, freely adapted by Roy Thomas for the comic.

Beside Conan chronicles and his historical adventures, Howard also wrote and sold stories about Boxing to pulps as ‘Fight stories’ and ‘Action stories’, featuring his sailor ‘Steve Costigan’. Along Howards story ‘The Shadow of the Vulture’, the last issue of ‘Magic Carpet Magazine’ (left) also featured one his boxing stories which he had written under the alias ‘Patrick Ervin’. Scarcely distributed as the magazine was, it has become a legendary thing between collectors.
Howard also wrote western stories. ‘Mountain Man’ , published in ‘Action stories’ March/April 1934 was his first. ‘Breckenridge Elkins’, the main character would prove popular enough to create and sell 26 stories the next two years. His other creation ‘Francis Xavier Gordon’, was a gunfighter from El Paso who lived and traveled the far east, kinda like Indiana Jones would nowadays.









Created by the American-Japanese Jetlag Productions Studio together with American Sunbow Productions (Transformers and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero) the first episode of their animated cartoon series ‘Conan the Adventurer’ aired on October 1992. The series ran for two seasons, 13 episodes in the first and again 52 in the second. The last episode aired on January 21^st 1994. Check here to catch some of this stuff on Youtube.

Following in the footsteps of Filmation’s popular cartoon series ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’ and Marvel’s ‘Dungeon and Dragons’ (co-produced with Toei Animation) Conan the Adventurer showed all the good stuff while stripping some of Conans barbarian qualities, making the character suitable for a younger audience.

The plot shows Conan fighting Serpent men and shape shifters with a special sword named Star Metal, crafted by his father from a meteor that fell from the sky. Because it has the power to open portals to other dimensions, the reptilian leader Wrath-Amon tries to get possession of Conan’s sword and free Set from the Abyss, where he was banished long ago for trying to enslave the human race. Still sounds pretty cool, right?

The complete series was released on DVD in 2009 in very limited quantities, if youre into it and didnt get a chance to grab a copy, dont sweat it: Shout! Factory will be releasing the first season on a 2-disc DVD set on July 26th!

Conan and the Young Warriors (1994).

A spin-off, Conan and the Young Warriors was created in 1994 by Michael Reaves (Batman: The Animated Series), but crashed after the first season of thirteen episodes. Voiced by Phil Hayes, Conan finds himself training three young warriors (hence the title) destined to rule over Hyboria in the future, they possess magical star stones.

Project Pride and the Howard museum.

With financial support from fans around the world and the estate of Alla Ray Morris (who inherited the rights to Robert Howard’s fiction), the community organization in Cross Plains, Texas bought the house that Robert and his family lived in all their lives and restored it into a museum in 1989. The house has been restored and refurnished like it used to be when the Howard’s lived there, and you can actually check out and visit Robert’s room, where he typed all his stories.


Although the restoration has been completed and the house is listed in the National Register of Historic Places since 1994, maintenance still requires funds. Project Pride is a non-profit organization, if you like you can join them for a small amount as an individual or a family. Check out their website and make sure to visit the official REH foundation site. Theyve got some excellent information on Howard and publish extremely rare material from the author. Below: Howard with his dog Patches.



Yes, Howards room has an original Underwood typewriter from the 1930s at his desk, although that is not the one he actually used to type out all his stories (which was bought a long time ago by an American). The picture above is a photo of the one that is on display at the museum.

On June 12th 1947, the French comic magazine Spirou published its first pages of Morris funny western comic Lucky Luke. The story, titled Dick Diggers Goldmine (La Mine Dor de Dick Digger) ran from issue 478 to 502. Before that, Dupuis had already published Arizona 1880 in their Spirou Almanach 1947, Morris first real western story, that introduced Lucky Luke as a true western hero, complete with a white horse and a white Stetson cowboy hat (published on December 7, 1946).

Readers loved Morris take on the western genre and his funny drawings, that were clearly still very much inspired by Disney and other American cartoons. His next short stories Lucky Luke and his horse Jolly Jumper (Lucky Luke et son cheval Jolly Jumper) and The Look-Alike of Lucky Luke (La sosie de Lucky Luke) were published in issue 503-527 in 1947 and collected in his first hardcover album, published two years later in 1949 (today, the short stories with Jolly Jumper are collected together with Morris first story in the second book titled Arizona).

Working together with Franquin and Jijé, comic artists that made Spirou magazine such a great succes, they traveled overseas to the US in 1948, where they continued to draw their comics for Dupuis. Morris was the only one that stayed until 1955. It wasn t in Belgium, nor France but in the US that he and René Goscinny met for the first time and talked about him taking over the scriptwriting for Lucky Luke. Goscinny, who would become world famous for his creation of Asterix with Albert Uderzo in 1969, agreed and started writing for Lucky Luke with the story Rails on the Prairie (Des Rails sur la Prairie), first published in Spirou magazine on August 25, 1955. It wasnt until their tenth collaboration on The Rivals of Painful Gaulch (Les Rivaux de Painful Gulch) in 1962 that Goscinny stepped into the light and received credit as the writer. Until then, every book had only mentioned Morris as the author, crediting him story and drawings by Morris.

Below: the cover of the Dutch version of Spirou magazine titled Robbedoes from August 25, 1955. As was the habit in those days, the first page of the most prominent comic that week would fill the cover of the weekly magazine to draw people in. Normally it was Franquins Spirou, but that week the new Lucky Luke premiered, so the first page of Rails on the Prairie, Goscinnys first story, was published on the cover.


Below: Watchful eyes surely have seen Morris signature in the last image of the page posted above, this time secretly mentioning a certain R.G beside Morris, which of course was René Goscinny. Morris did it on every page of this story, but following stories dont mention Goscinny until his official first credit on The Rivals of Painful Gaulch in 1962.