Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Black and White Wednesday: "The Blood-Colored Motorbike!" by Jose Bea
Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Ah, summertime! Bet a lot of ya would like to hop on a motorbike and take a ride to the beach, the lake, or the mountains right about now. Do you want it as bad as Cesare Santoni? We sure hope not! Ol' Cesare got the well-deserved ride of his life in this more-graphically-violent-than-normal fear-fable by Jose Bea! Strap on your helmet (maybe that'll help) as you read..."The Blood-Colored Motorbike!" from Creepy #61 (cover-dated April 1974)...
It's a nice story and great art, but one thing's puzzling me: why the italian setting? It seems Milan is just a location and the story could as well be set in England or USA.
ReplyDeleteAt first I thought their factory PRODUCED motorbykes (we made quite cool cars and bykes back then, when we had a motor industry). But no.
So, what does "National Steel" do, exactly? We had many steel factories, partly nationalized, (we're selling them one by one to foreign gobblers now) but surely much larger than that plant.
Another quite disturbing thing is Benutti's face. I have a feeling that is based on some TV or movie personality of the era, but I can't match it to a name. Or maybe Bea just based his work on photographs?
Bea definitely used photo references for his people. Still a great horror artist, though. Those thin, scratchy ink lines...
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