The occult, sleaze, drugs and rock 'n roll collide in a profane black comedy that cruises the outback highways, dive pub khazis and scabrous upper echelons of the Republic of Australia circa 1993. It’s a black out drunk bender of utterly ludicrous dimensions.
Watch this space.
My very kind, good friend Justin talks about the original Home Brew pitch back in 2013:
Before Home Brewed, Vampire Bullets was a nascent novel in progress, it was the slightly differently monickered Home Brew Vampire Bullets, an anthology of Aussie genre fiction, punditry, comics and whatever else floated my proverbial (and still does).
You can read - or buy! - the original mammoth collected tomes here, or grab ZERO, a free preview, here. There are some sample spreads on this very site, even.
The following offers some insights into the mast's design, and, perhaps more pertinently, the years - nay decades - of unwitting preparatory work that led to the project finally blinking into existence.
I've annotated the visual references and included them here as a gallery above, because who can be fucked with laboriously image formatting posts in this time poor day and age?
The logo that adorns the book, our tees, prints and all the other synapse-snapping collateral you see here has been bubbling away in my subconscious since I first daubed a rickety looking Judas Priest logo on a pencil case somewhere around Year Eight (1).
Scratching meticulous, geometrically (and occasionally typographically) complex logos in biro, on vinyl what’s more, clearly locked the ol’ career path to ‘anal retentive self flagellation’ long before I discovered the totality of my options were Medicine, Law or Apprentice Boilermaker.
These tees then, some of which I may have owned in one lurid form or another, represent my nascent exposure to graphic design, and locked blackletter forms deep in a vault somewhere: eternally Evil and Bad Arse, a jigsaw of swooping, predatory forms begging to be solved.
(I would later discover, through thorough research, that a lot of beer labels and logos embrace the style, funnily enough.)
Vaguely hungover, digging through a stack of second (fifth? Ninth?) hand magazines somewhere on Smith St., Collingwood, this masterpiece of saturated early seventies design smut punches through (2).
It’s out of a ’sporting’ shooting magazine, something about juicing up your ordnance through no doubt rock solid chemistry to exact maximum carnage on the veldt.
Sadly, I neglected to buy it, but did take a quick, blurry snap.
Just in case.
The article title stuck, rolled around the cranium for a bit.
Same for the imagery- that burnished, blast furnace sepia and ochre’s always lived in my palette, strangely enough.
I’ll spare you the early excursions and explorations of the disco meets stick flick via Rainbow look that initiated the process, but suffice it to say things took a turn for the inevitably Gothic.
I never rated that calligraphic, Biblically inspired (ironies lost for a while yet) logo Judas Priest used into the late ‘70s. Too much like the stuff me mum painstakingly rendered via tracing paper onto Philharmonic posters, perhaps?
Those two albums, Sin After Sin and Rocka Rolla (the reissue, pictured, by Melvyn Grant, fantasy artist) did use blackletter in their title treatments, and I very much locked that shit away and unconsciously explored it down the years (3).
With overall concept starting to coalesce, and having the luxury of the internet, I set out to unearth a blackletter that wasn’t a Flyerfont or an LHF offering.
Even in these heady days of Top 50 Metal Fonts and semi-defunct Angelfire sites laden with poorly constructed knock offs of band logos, this proved more of a chore than initially expected.
A chore, that is, if you consider venturing further and further into the Type-Nerd Narnia a taxing endeavour.
Eventually Blaktur and Asgardian Wars (yes indeed) picked themselves out as our faces of choice: a combination of the two made most sense, as Asgardian Wars’ punctuation and numeral forms were less than suitable (practically non existent) (4).
I’ll leave you to provide your own Norse mythology/ typography related pun right here.
Next up? Figuring out how to get the bastards to sing.
Cue the usual scattershot landscape of upper and lower case forms (5).
A jigsaw with no solution, just the knowledge that you’ll know when it feels ’right’ via some nonsense equation of negative shapes, X and Y heights and some blind luck.
By which I mean talent, of course.
Let’s pause here to acknowledge that every single time you see a yellow-red linear gradient in my work, it’s because of Barbarian (6-8).
With the overall look locked down, I, of course, succumbed to some extreme design overkill (I design DVDs by day, aright?)- bullet holes, blood, all the paper textures on the hard drive, all that good stuff (9).
A combination of factors, thankfully, intervened:
1. The eye bleeding busy-ness of any potential cover with that kitchen sink included logo was not an ideal outcome
2. We wanted to sell some promotional tees and the screen printers limited us to ten blessed, very reasonable colours
(Home brew vampire) bullet dodged (ho ho): I limited the palette, worked in my ‘signature’ gradient and had a punchy, None More Metal logo on my hands.
We’re in business: now to refine.
Here’s where a bit of that Judas Priest foreshadowing pays off (10).
The original cover to their debut album featured this John Pasche bottle cap design, which was apparently intended for a Stones album (Pasche designed their ‘tongue’ logo, for starters).
Initially knocked together as a tee shirt design (see aforementioned foreshadowing), as the piece developed it was clear the overall effort was mighty, iconic and encapsulated the HBVB ideal rather succinctly.
Sorted: the logo was applied to ZERO in its simplified form, retaining its distinctiveness and proving its worth in a variety of applications.
We’ll call that a lock, then (11).
All of the above took, varyingly, the better part of twenty years to parse and synthesise, and a month or so to finally nail down.
Here're a few - heavy on the bloviation- interviews and media bits collected whilst promoting the Home Brew Vampire Bullets anthology back in 2013-14.
Aurealis interview parts one, two and three.
Sci-Fi and Squeam, on JoyFM
Geek of Oz
Newsarama Best Shots 2013
Behind the Panels
Stefan Loves Stories
The Momus Report
Justin Hamilton
Promise I'll update this when whenever I next get a hankering to ego-surf, yep.
Here's a piece on the Mad Max Museum out in Silverton, NSW, which is just twenty minutes from my home town, Broken Hill.
I wrote, designed and shot this one for Home Brew Vampire Bullets TWO.
Sensing a theme, yet?
Instagram is riddled with censorious bores, so here's a gallery loaded up with some of the inspiration - pop and otherwise - behind the Home Brewed, Vampire Bullets project, sans the angst of wondering if someone will take issue with a blurry shot of a muff or the word 'cock'.
Feel free to follow me on Insta @jonesesque, anyway.
(Just don't report my very carefully curated, mildly 'edgy' - sigh - but in no way offensive shit, okay? Deal? deal.)
An ever evolving playlist of predominantly Aussie rock and or roll that is referenced in or potentially inspired something pertinent in Home Brewed, Vampire Bullets. There's an old Soundcloud playlist buried here, too.
Here's a very optimistic plot map I put together at the start of the project.
While the spine still holds, it's fair to say that the act of putting the proverbial pen to paper means that this thing has veered off the tracks in wildly more interesting ways as it's taken shape.
Click to enlarge.
Harvesting visual inspiration for the final stretch.
Ed Von Satan character study and cover from 2013, by the wizard Si Sherry.
Slouching on to the internet like an angry drunk after the footy, Home Brew Vampire Bullets #0gives a taste of what the first issue due to drop in November has in store for readers. Reveling in the DIY ethos of punk, underground zines, rough and ready Ozploitation cinema and snide Larrikinism, the comix anthology mixes horror, satire and comedy to make a heady brew.
With a host of Aussie creators assembled by Garth Jones - in a pub, of course - the anthology can claim the likes of Tristan Jones, Jen Breach, Douglas Holgate, Christian Read, Simon Sherry, Micca Delaney, Kate Moon, Nate Soehardi and Scott Fraser (plus many others - visit the HBVB site for more names and threatening mug-shots). Jones sums up the spirit behind the book thusly:
The HBVB ethos was certainly forged in the spirit of snotty, middle finger aloft, amyl huffing provocation and Larrikinism. That sort of 'the only rules are there are none' spirit very much informs the way I've approached curating the book- 'hands off, do your worst, kids'.
We all work in the creative industry- we're illustrators, designers, animators, writers, directors, musicians, and to be able to put together a project with no constraints after the brick wall moments in our day jobs is a gratifying thing indeed. It's a perfect opportunity to embrace this crew's weird sensibilities, floor it and see where we end up.
The #0 issue sets up a number of these stories, with sales of the digital edition intended to help bring the premiere issue to print. To give just a taste there is promotional artwork and sketches from Breach and Holgate's intriguing dystopian project Maralinga; Ryan K. Lindsay and Louis Joyce's The Many Harold Holts of Space & Time kicks off with the neat premise that every conspiracy theory about what really happened to the missing Australian PM Holt occurred simultaneously*; RS-Hell is a short and sweet ghost-catcher as Aussie shit-kicker fable from Christian Read and Aly; The Tachyon Tribulations of Dr Radium is a satirical essay by Neil Blanch on the future of Australia post-Tony Abbott electoral win that reads like Jonathan Swift on goon-juice; then there's preview art from Hot Hot Women in Cool Cool Prison by Mark Selan and Steve Martinez, a title which promises exploitation cinema excess.
There's a blunted affection for Australiana and the tropes of Ozploitation at work here, something of a rich seam for the creators to explore. This is not simply nostalgia for its own sake, or pat irreverence - there's an underlying sense of anger to some of these stories, as well as a chaffing at the limited perspective on Australian culture presented in the media to the rest of the world. The combination of influences has obviously inspired the assemblage of writers and illustrators gathered by Jones - with Home Brew Vampire Bullets presenting enough exoticism to be of interest to readers outside of Australia.
Well, I grew up having a bit of a love/ hate affair with the grittier aspects of Australian identity, coming from far Western NSW and all that entails, culturally speaking, masquerading as a delicate young artist in a town whose social calendar peaked on Grand Final Day.
It was actually Mark Hartley's 'Not Quite Hollywood' documentary that reacquainted me with a lot of the flicks I'd rejected out of hand as a kid with a healthy streak of cultural cringe, but which really informed my interests and aesthetic: Mad Max, Razorback, Dark Age, Stone, Wake In Fright.
There's a real 'fuck it, let's just do it and see what happens' spirit to those things, and it's a tragedy our celluloid output these days has lost that devil may care edge.
That's the reason the anthology exists: embodying that attitude in a medium where we can truly do whatever the fuck we want, red tape free and all bets well and truly off, creatively.
It's interesting how much Hartley's film was promoted on the back of Quentin Tarantino featuring in it as an interviewee as if that was the only thing of note, but the documentary does address a side of Australian culture that has largely been forgotten - or perhaps more accurately, buried with an embarrassed flick of the spade. The other point of comparison for HBVB is Oz magazine - which was celebrated in Alan Moore's Dodgem Logic not too long ago as a genuinely challenging underground zine. In that regard it aims to be purpose-driven in its obscenity and irreverence, as well as a liberating creative outlet for its team of creatives.
This helps set the anthology apart from its independent comics cousins. It comes from a definite time and place, with a distinctive sense of identity:
I think the primary demarcation here is that we're not setting out to strictly do 'comics'. That's the spine of the book, for sure, and the focus of a lot of our work and interests. I've taken to characterising the anthology more along the lines of being the bastard offspring of 2000AD, Metal Hurlant and Oz magazine: a 100 proof dose of piss and vinegar satire, rollicking serialised narrative and muscular pulp prose with a spot of off kilter journalism thrown in for good measure.
So it's a bit of a mongrel undertaking, and the scrappier, pub rock cranking, tongue in cheek heart of the effort are what sets it apart, I'd say.
Issue #1 is set to land in November, with #0 available digitally right now. The #HBVB crew can be found on Facebook and Twitter, for continuing updates, preview art samples and general goss. Enjoy.
* (there's also a kick-ass T-Shirt to promote the storyline featuring Russian superspy Holt)
Cheers to Emmet O'Cuana for digging into the archives and unearthing this one!
I absolutely dig generating world building design assets - these could well be considered easter eggs for the book, though the concepts and characters have mutated loads since these were produced five years ago.
Written by Christian Read, drawn by me, this is the elemental comics birthplace of what's evolving into Home Brewed, Vampire Bullets - A Novel.
Published in Home Brew Vampire Bullets ONE in 2013, the task of coordinating around twenty artists and writers and laying out around 150 pages of content on a quarterly schedule quickly put paid to any delusions I had of generating regular comics illustration as part of the project (or in general - fuck me, it's time consuming).
You can check out the short story that's becoming the book that was inspired by this unfinished comic here.
