Popa's Jeremy Haun Art Collection

Before 2008, I think I'd met comic book artist Jeremy Haun once, buying a couple trades off him while he worked on a GI Joe sketch for Shane - probably BeachHEAD.  But I was hanging around Heroes Con 2008 and Shane walked up to me and said 'you need to go talk to Jeremy Haun.'  I asked why and he said 'because he thinks The Creature From the Black Lagoon is the hero of the movie, like you do.'

Given that Haun was clearly a genius, I went over and introduced myself to Jeremy Haun and we started talking about monster movies, quickly realizing we had the same taste in them.  Then we realized not only did we have the same taste in good horror movies, we also had the same taste in bad horror movies.  Here's the thing: lots of people like respectable horror movies, Universal monster movies and the like but a lot of those people don't like sleazy horror movies, slasher movies and their endless and more brain-dead sequels.  But I love those movies and so does Haun.  And I don't mean 'we watch them and make fun of them the whole time.  We LIKE them.  We talked about the overlooked "Black Christmas" remake, a movie about five people on Earth like, but we're two of them.  We talked about "My Bloody Valentine" as if it were a classic piece of cinema.

We started talking the Saturday of that show and I was just starting my horror movie sketchbook.  All that Black Lagoon talk certainly got me interested in getting a commission of The Creature from Jeremy, which he obliged.  I gave him my book and he said he'd do the sketch that night in his room.

The next morning he delivered this gem to my comicbook art collection:



The funniest part (to me) is that apparently he spent too much time on my piece the night before and didn't get the piece he'd been working on before it done -- which was Shane's sketch that got bumped to the next morning!

Jump ahead to the first C2E2 convention in Chicago which Shane and I attended.  The year before that convention the Cranboyz and I had a theme called "Year of the Serpent" wherein Shane and I got sketches of the Captain America villains The Serpent Society and our friends got other sketches with a serpentine theme.  Well, another thing Jeremy and I have in common is a fondness for childish innuendo, laughing at characters named Snowjob and The Hard Master like twelve year-olds.  Thus I saved the Serpent Society member BUSHMaster for him.  To say he delivered on the ... subtext ... would be an understatement :)



At that same show, though, I was hanging around BS'ing and Jeremy said 'dude, what are you doing making me draw a superhero, where's the monster book?'  So we chatted a bit about what he might draw and settled on Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's "It" novel and movie.

Jeremy delivered this perfectly disturbing rendition of that classic villain the next day, a sketch that scares women and children because Pennywise is evil.  The blood running down the drain is a particularly good effect, same with the 'missing children' posters.



Next time I saw Jeremy was Heroes Con in 2012 and decided to keep going with classics, asking for an old school Leatherface, which I oh so politely called 'full retard version.'  This intense sketch came the next day, love that massive chainsaw in the foreground.



When this year's Heroes Con rolled around, I planned ahead, asking Jeremy way in advance what he wanted to draw, settling on the options of Candyman or Jason Voorhees but the Friday the 13th part 2 version, where he wore the pillowcase over his head.  Jeremy jumped at the idea of drawing Jason.

When I got to the show I gave him my sketchbook and told him I had reference but he scoffed at the suggestion.  He didn't need no stinkin' reference, even telling me a story that he visited a family member before the show and asked if they had a potato pitchfork he could use for reference to get the angle of the shot right.

Seriously, this piece kicks major ass -  assuming those aren't my hands in the foreground!



Oh, as an added bonus, I helped support Jeremy's Kickstarter book "Bad Karma" and when I received my hardback, he'd drawn a quick sketch of Leslie Vernon inside the box.  Why Leslie Vernon?  Because, Leslie Vernon's awesome, everyone knows that.



So thanks Jeremy for all this great artwork -- I'm sure you'll be adding a lot more to the book as the years go on!!   I mean, who else wants to draw the Miner from "My Bloody Valentine?"