October 27th, 2014

Creepy black cats

by James Allen

Today’s Mark Trail regarding black cats has a couple of little interesting tidbits of “inside baseball” some readers may want to know. First, the top panel with the logo in it – a spooky shot of black cats on tombstones in a graveyard. It is an “homage” to a piece of art by a famous horror artist, Bernie Wrightson. He did a piece of similar art and the “story” behind it was :he went to a flooded cemetery once and saw all these snakes that had slithered up on tombstones to escape the water and decided to depict the scene replacing the snakes with black cats. It is a wonderful piece of art and I decided to pay a little tribute to Bernie by doing a similar shot in the logo panel. Second, I have two black cats as pets… one is Kong (of course) and he is pictured lying on the table in the first stretched panel, and the other black cat is Lil’ Dude… he is pictured in the last panel stretched across the top of two filing cabinets. I referenced off an actual photo in both instances, but in that last panel… the two filing cabinets – they’re real. When Jack Elrod retired, he gave me all of his research… animal info and tons of photographs… it’s all in 2 giant filing cabinets. As soon as I moved them into my studio, Lil’ Dude jumped on top of them and layed down. I took the photo and now… he’s in a Mark Trail strip, actually laying on Mark Trail research! Now you know. 🙂