"Impetus"
While I consider my skills have improved greatly since I did this pin-up, it remains to this day as one of my favorites. For starters, it was my first successful pin-up I ever did which actually conveyed some action. Since my plan was to create a sort-of ‘action movie’ poster for a short comic story I was planning on doing (and still will, I swear!), I’d certainly hope it’d be action-packed. But I can’t lie, I can remember it being a hard task for someone who didn’t know the first step about proportion. A lot of re-do’s were done until it was just about right.
It was also around this time that Tony and I got our hands on a program that’d change our art forever: Adobe Photoshop. With it, we’d hit the Kinkos he worked at in (and for the record, I did before him) in the middle of the night and spend countless of hours trying out all sorts of neat things. Truth be told, I probably learned more about the program competiting against Tony on who could learn the most tricks than I would in some classroom. Little did we know that one particular trick would create a brand-new character that’s still around today.
The flaming guy on the bottom of the picture is Impetus, a superman-like hero who meets a very gruesome ending. Now I’m not sure how we did it, but between the two of us, we found a way to create that charred look. And boy, did the look of the character make an impression on us; especially with Tony. Before I knew it, he was adding Impetus in some of his pin-ups; each time making him decomposed more and more. Eventually we realized Impetus, who in his after-death life would be forever be named Crispie, was going to be a permanent member of our cast. Now if only I could just get my act in gear and finish up that comic... - Jake