"Dawn of the Dense" ("Dawn of the Dead")
If you were to check out the IMDB page for the remake to "Dawn of the Dead", the website will tell you the film was released in theaters nationwide on March 19th, 2004; a little over two months prior to "Van Helsing" which Tony and I kicked our summer movie season off with on May 8th. So, why include it here and out of order?
Because during the weekend of May 22nd, a rare box office anomaly occurred. Not a single new film was released. Not in the major theaters. Not in small art house cafes. Nowhere. It was an event which seldom happens, especially during the summer months, because movie theaters rely on new releases to keep the box office momentum going.
However, their loss was going to be our gain. Knowing there was little I could do; I was fully prepared to take a week off from the gallery, giving me more time to work on my homage to "The Day After Tomorrow".
Speaking of work, for some reason I was blessed in the past to work at jobs which sometimes had slow periods. Slow enough to last entire shifts. And ironically it was always with employees who also enjoyed illustrating. A "Oh hey, you draw comic books? Me too!" sort of thing. So, it was normal when my co-worker Mesa challenged me on an overnight shift to draw a comic page based on the theme of a 'virus'. I had only one hour to do as much as I could, including dialogue. And to my surprise, I managed to get all the pencils and dialogue finished in less than an hour. I was so proud of my accomplishment I couldn't wait to show it off to Tony. To my chagrin, he liked it too.
"You know this has to be the next entry" he said as he immediately sat down at his desk and started inking the page. Yes, he was in the middle of chemotherapy, but he wanted to contribute at least something to the gallery that year. So, given the circumstances of a weekend box office drought and the fact "Dawn of the Dead" was still technically playing in theaters, we decided to include a homage to a two-month-old film. It was only one of three times we ever broke the gallery format.
As you might notice, the panels are a little blurry compared to the captions and word balloons. That was intentionally Tony's idea. Given how we were covering a remake of a classic genre film, which had been re-mastered and re-colored for decades to the point the additions are glaringly obvious, we purposely tried to give the page the same obvious effect. - Jake