Pete Von Sholly’s day job would be enough excitement for most of us. He creates storyboards for big budget Hollywood movies, and if you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption or Mars Attacks!, for example, the finished product was based on his early drawings.
But being a respected, behind-the-scenes craftsman isn’t satisfying Von Sholly’s fertile mind. For several years, he’s been meshing a unique form of comics and cartoons that combine hand-drawn images with real life. Sometimes he displays an EC Comics style of horror. Sometimes his dinosaur fetish is on display for all to see.
Lately though, Von Sholly has turned his attention to politics, and the result is hilarious – Capitol Hell, a collection of postcards published in book form, by Denis Kitchen Publishing.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Pete, tell me a little bit about Capitol Hell. Why are you so mean to America’s beloved political leaders?
PETE VON SHOLLY: Well, how many people did Freddy Krueger kill?
ANDELMAN: I lost track.
VON SHOLLY: Or Godzilla? All the movie monsters you can think of, roll them all together, how many people did they kill?
ANDELMAN: Well…
VON SHOLLY: They didn’t kill anybody because they’re made up, but how many people did Pol Pot kill? And Adolf Hitler? Not that our leaders are anything like them, but people that do really bad things are the real monsters, I think. And some of the things going on in the world just screamed out for some comment, hopefully in an entertaining way.
ANDELMAN: Do you think the last couple years we’ve been afraid to make fun of political leaders? Has the environment changed?
VON SHOLLY: I don’t know. It seems like your patriotism is suspect if you make fun of anybody.
ANDELMAN: So should we be suspect of your patriotism, Pete?
VON SHOLLY: It depends how you define patriotism, I guess. I actually just was noticing that Dick Cheney kind of looks like a mean guy in certain pictures, and Rudy Giuliani looks like Nosferatu whenever I see him. And that’s just a visual observation, bad pictures maybe, I don’t know, but every time I see these guys I think, “Man!” So I made up a couple joke images of them as monsters and sent them to Denis Kitchen, mostly as, “Isn’t this funny?”, sort of a throw-away gag kind of thing, and Denis jumped on the idea and said this might make a great political postcard book if I could come up with 24 of them. So that’s all I needed to hear.
ANDELMAN: And you’ve got Dick Cheney who becomes a version of Dracula as “Dickula.”
VON SHOLLY: He’s “Dickula,” yeah, sucking the life out of Colin Powell.
ANDELMAN: Rudy Giuliani is “Nosferudy” from Nosferatu. One of my favorites, of course, and it’s not because it’s necessarily the best image, but “Doctor Jerkyll.” That would be our current president. John Murtha became “Murthra” like in a Godzilla movie.
VON SHOLLY: Right.
ANDELMAN: What were some of your favorites to do?
VON SHOLLY: Well, “The Creature from the Black Community” just made me laugh — Al Sharpton. And I knew there was a picture of the Creature from the Black Lagoon in chains, and I thought that would be just a great image to put Al Sharpton in. He’s such an opportunist. A lot of the people that we started out mentioning happened to be Republicans, but they’re not the only ones to blame. And I think that if you look at the book, you will see Bill and Hillary and Barack Obama and everybody else. So actually, it’s an even-handed…Melvin Van Peebles said I was an equal-opportunity offender.
ANDELMAN: I think that’s fair to say. The Clintons get their fair share, and they become the “Clintonsteins” as in Frankenstein and The Bride.
VON SHOLLY: Kind of interchangeable.
ANDELMAN: And actually, you get Hillary in there twice. What is the second one that Hillary is?
VON SHOLLY: Actually, the still is from 20 Million Miles to Earth. It’s a Ray Harryhausen movie. But Denis was talking about Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and I thought that…First of all, there’s a tricky process if anybody looks at the book. I had to find pictures of monsters and pictures of politicians that worked together, and I didn’t want to change the people’s faces too much. Dick Cheney has to look like Dick Cheney even if he’s dressed up as Dracula. You still have to know who they are so finding the right pictures was tricky. And there are no great stills from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and so I thought a giant woman picture will do, and so I ended up using a different image to work from with her.
ANDELMAN: I think it’s one of the best ones in there. There’s some that harken back. You have Ronald Reagan as “Ron Zombie.”
VON SHOLLY: Yes, I like that one.
ANDELMAN: I can’t make up my mind if that is supposed to be him as he would be today or if that’s him while he was in office. I think either one could really kind of fit.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah, you decide.
ANDELMAN: Let me pause for a second while we’re talking about this. I want to tell people that they can see some of these images online at either of your websites – www.capitol-hell.com or vonshollywood.com. And there’s also a video on YouTube. I believe if you search Capitol Hell you will see a video for this.
VON SHOLLY: I made a little animated film to augment the book. Also, I recorded the music for it. It’s a minor key version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” replete with gunfire and screams and explosions and things. It’s kind of a pithy little tune.
ANDELMAN: Who is the toughest politician to capture in this format?
VON SHOLLY: There wasn’t anybody especially tough. You reminded me of something, if I may digress just a little. There are a lot of images that aren’t in the book. One of my favorites was Larry King as “The Hunchback,” and I’ve got him up on the parapet of the castle with this great still from The Hunchback with Larry King’s face on it, and it’s “King of the Castle.” And also, Tony Blair in England. We’ve got “The Blairwolf of London” with him as The Werewolf of London and with a British Petroleum lab he’s got going there. So not all of the pictures made it into the book, but the hardest thing sometimes was simply going through pictures. I didn’t want to steal people’s pictures. I wanted to use pictures that I was pretty sure were up for grabs and also modified them enough so I wouldn’t really be just taking somebody else’s work. The hardest part was finding them sometimes. The lighting had to match. And you’d be surprised; you search a certain politician looking for images, and you find the same image a thousand times. It’s like no, I need the light on this side. I need this kind of an expression. So I don’t recall anybody special, but the hardest part was getting something where the two pictures would blend seamlessly.
ANDELMAN: Is it a Photoshop process you used? Tell me about the mechanical side.
VON SHOLLY: Yes, it’s Photoshop. I learned Photoshop. I was at Disney Feature Animation for a couple years, and that was a mixed experience. It started out great, and it turned absolutely horrible. But while we were there, this was during the making of the movie Dinosaur. I love dinosaurs, as you mentioned, and as you will notice, if you look at anything about me, you’ll see a dinosaur pop up whenever I get the chance. Working on this dinosaur movie, they had Doug Henderson, Ricardo Delgado, David Krantz and Tom Enriquez, William Stout, Mark Hallet, and Brian Franczak. These are all names that people who are into dinosaurs would know. All great artists and me, for what I’m worth. We had all this talent applied to this project, and it was so sad to see it turn into such a lousy movie.
But anyway, while I was there, this was all hand-drawn artwork, of course. They gave classes in Photoshop, and then I kind of asked for a transfer to another film because I felt so useless. I never had that on a job before where I felt like I’m not helping. I can’t help. And I love dinosaurs, and this is killing me. So they didn’t like me because of that, and so they tried to lay me off, but I had time on my contract. I know this is a long story here, but we’ve got time, right?
ANDELMAN: That’s alright.
VON SHOLLY: So I had about nine months sitting home getting paid, which was the best job ever because they wouldn’t pay me off and I had a contract, and we offered. We said, “Give me 50 cents on the dollar for what’s left of my contract, and we’ll call it a day.” And they go, “Oh, no, we can’t do that.” So weeks turned into months, and I kept getting paid every week, and there was nothing to do cause I wasn’t assigned on a film. And so I stayed home and learned Photoshop. I figured having been exposed to it at Disney and watching other people use it was intriguing, but it’s really hard to learn something watching other people do it. And I suddenly got this brilliant idea that if I stayed home and bought a computer and bought Photoshop and learned what I wanted to do with it, I could. And so that was what I did. And a friend of mine, Mike Van Cleave, a great cartoonist/musician/good pal, he suggested that I try comics using the Photoshop technique that I’d been working on for other things, and so I did. And I found that it was really, really fun doing comics that way.
ANDELMAN: So that was kind of a late career development for you, to get into comics.
VON SHOLLY: Well, I always wanted to do comics, and I did comics for years including some underground comics, one with Timothy Leary, which has popped up lately which suddenly people are interested in, which is surprising to me cause I did it so long ago. I always loved comics when I was a kid, and I always wanted to do comics. But it’s hard to make money, at least it was for me, in comics. So the movie/storyboarding thing kind of became my career, but the love for comics was always there so it sort of became natural to put the two things together. In the comics, I work with people too, and so it’s like casting for a movie, and it’s like directing your actors, and there’s a lot of interaction, and it’s a lot of fun working with people. This would be like Morbid and Extremely Weird Stories, the Dark Horse Books.
ANDELMAN: We’ll come to that. Let me come back to Capitol Hell a little bit. Do you at all wish you had foreseen the rise of Mike Huckabee and included him?
VON SHOLLY: Sure. If we’d known he was going to become such a highly visible figure, he would’ve been in there for sure. It’s really hard to predict what’s gonna happen, but we have a special “Screed of Huckie” card prepared, which is Huckabee as Chuckie, and it’s pretty funny. So Denis is considering rushing out a special card, because these are postcards, so this can be done as an individual card.
ANDELMAN: Well, I wondered about that. Now the book is a collection of postcards, and you can actually tear them out and mail them to people. But I have to say, I guess it’s the old comic collector in me, it’s hard for me to bring myself to tear something out of a book.
VON SHOLLY: Oh, you have to buy two.
ANDELMAN: Yeah, right! Are you and Denis going to release these as individual postcards this year?
VON SHOLLY: Yes. They are available as individual cards.
ANDELMAN: A-ha! And how would one order that?
VON SHOLLY: Through Denis Kitchen’s site. I don’t know if they’re set up for the individual card orders yet or not. I haven’t been involved in that, but I’m sure he offers them as individual cards. That would be deniskitchenpublishing.com, I think, or maybe through the capitol-hell.com site, there’s a link to individual cards.
ANDELMAN: Well, hopefully, they’re setting up to take those orders now. Are the Clintons just too easy to make fun of?
VON SHOLLY: Well, I don’t hate the Clintons as much as most people, but I guess I wasn’t as mean to them as I was to some people, but they’re fair game.
ANDELMAN: Obviously, you have to work on a book like this ahead, and obviously, you didn’t know that Mike Huckabee would be the rising star on the eve of Iowa. Of course, in a couple weeks, he may be history. Were you anticipating that Barack Obama would continue to be a player by the time the book reached publication?
VON SHOLLY: I think so, yeah. I think we figured that he and Hillary were probably the most likely Democrats. You take your best guess ahead of time.
ANDELMAN: Who is the toughest to find just the right monster or scenario for? Who did you really lose sleep over?
VON SHOLLY: People I didn’t know that much about. Fred Thompson, for instance. I think Denis thought we should get Fred Thompson in there because he was making a lot of noise, and I didn’t know much about Fred Thompson. I’m not really a politically savvy person. So it’s like, figure out a monster that seems appropriate. People that are less well known were the harder.
ANDELMAN: Thompson, I would think that would be a little tough although he’s well-known. I don’t know any monsters that are like asleep at the wheel. I’m with you. I am just as happy to make fun of one side as the other, frankly.
VON SHOLLY: And we got Bill Maher and Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart and Ann Coulter and O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. We got all those kind of people in the mix, too. Sean Hannity.
ANDELMAN: Right. And what was the gag from Hannity and Stewart?
VON SHOLLY: Oh. Well, the still is from The Manster, and it also helps if you know your monster movies. There’s a Japanese monster movie called The Manster, which was about a guy who grew an extra head and there is a famous still of this two-headed monster wrestling with a guy. And so I made the two-headed monster into Colbert and Jon Stewart and Hannity into the guy that they’re fighting with because I figured he has a big enough mouth to fight two people.
ANDELMAN: The two-headed, was that the Rosie Grier?
VON SHOLLY: No, that was The Manster. The Rosie Grier was in The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant with Ray Milland.
ANDELMAN: Oh, okay. Alright. And then the other one I want to point out is “The Wicked Witch of the West Wing”: Condoleezza Rice as the Wicked Witch and George Bush as her pet monkey.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah, that’s a famous picture of George Bush where he’s making a goofy face.
ANDELMAN: As you’re looking into the crystal ball with Nancy Pelosi…
VON SHOLLY: …and Harry Reid.
ANDELMAN: And Harry Reid, yeah. I just love that one.
VON SHOLLY: My son came up with the name of that one, “The Wicked Witch of the West Wing.” He’s a helpful lad.
ANDELMAN: This is great. Barack Obama as Hellraiser and “Fundraiser.” I don’t know. Folks, you’ve gotta go look at this. Again, it’s www.capitol-hell.com. You can see some examples of this. Another great one is John McCain as Doctor Strangelove in “Doctor McCainlove.”
VON SHOLLY: Yeah. Going down with the bomb.
ANDELMAN: Yeah. You will laugh at those. Some of them I don’t want to quite give away, but let’s just say that Donald Rumsfeld is in there in a familiar pose. Let’s see. Who else should I mention here? Now Michael Moore. You slipped Michael Moore in there.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: And Karl Rove and Valerie Plame.
VON SHOLLY: And to my mind, it’s an election year so it is tied in inextricably to the election, but it’s also a picture of American politics at a certain time. And that’s why I wanted Larry King and other people in it, and that’s why some of the other people are in it, too, because they may not be Presidential candidates per se, but it’s more than that to me. It’s not just about the election. And the situation is fluid. There are two pictures of Barack Obama. There’s actually one called “The Empire Strikes Black” where Jesse Jackson is blasting Obama like the Emperor did to Darth Vader because in the news, there was an item that Jesse Jackson was criticizing Obama for being too white, and so that was the inspiration for that card. But it would be fun to do an ongoing series. You could just go on with this stuff because the news never stops and the surprises and the outrages never stop.
ANDELMAN: Pete, in all of your comic and cartoon work, but most of all that I’ve seen, there’s some common thread that I think must date back to EC Comics. Were you an EC guy?
PETE VON SHOLLY: I was too young, really. I was born in 1950, and that’s a handy year to be born when it comes to remembering how old you were when things happened. But EC Comics were just ahead of me, but I had an older brother who had some so I was fortunate enough to get a glancing blow with those. But they were scary. That’s what I remember about them, especially Graham Ingels. When you’re a little kid, they’re terrifying. The first cartoonists that I knew about by name were Charles Adams and Dr. Seuss.
ANDELMAN: Ah. Very different.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah, but I loved both of them, and we had some Charles Adams books around the house. And I used to love Dr. Seuss, especially McElligot’s Pool, which was in color which was kind of unusual. But those were real early influences. I didn’t really find out about EC Comics, to get back to your question, until much later when they started to reprint them.
ANDELMAN: Is it wrong to assume you’re a fan of horror comics.
VON SHOLLY: Oh no. I just didn’t grow up on those. There weren’t that many available to me, but the influence of EC Comics is so pervasive. I started, when Creepy came out, they had several of the EC artists, of course, in Eerie, the Warren Publications. So that was my EC Comics experience and in a way was sort of the second generation of those.
ANDELMAN: Dark Horse has published a number of collections of your work, which you kind of referenced earlier. They include Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Along that same line, are there any kind of inner demons you’d like to expose now on Mr. Media? Do you want to tell us any issues you’d like to tell us about?
VON SHOLLY: I like H.P. Lovecraft; I like horror stories. And I originally wanted to do Morbid as a horror magazine, and I couldn’t believe no one had used the name “Morbid” because they’ve got creepy, spooky, eerie, every ghastly, every word you can think of had been used to death but not morbid. But what happened is I started making these stories, and they didn’t want to be morbid all the time. They wanted to be funny so the thing kind of went its own way.
ANDELMAN: Are there more of them coming?
VON SHOLLY: I have more if somebody wants to publish them. I enjoy doing them. I did about 400 pages of stuff. I just get involved in a project and go barreling ahead with it whether I know it’s gonna get published or not. So I’ve got more material. Dark Horse, I don’t think they sold that well, to be honest. I think they sold okay, but times are a little tougher, and the comic book market is tough.
ANDELMAN: These books are somewhat different style than Capitol Hell. For example, I’m looking at Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid Two: Dead But Not Out!, and you’ve got this incredibly hideous creature with multiple heads. They’re all dead, but they’re alive, zombie-like, chasing after this rather buxom young lady in a bikini, a common thread also, and in the stories, you’ve got live actors responding to things in a very Hollywood-style, and you’ve drawn in, I guess. I wondered: are these drawn? Are these watercolored? What is the style?
VON SHOLLY: The monsters are sculptures. They’re three-dimensional sculptures. My wife is a fabulous sculptor, Andrea Von Sholly, and she’s sculpted a lot of them. We made some movies called Prehysteria, and she sculpted the dinosaurs for those, and she’s sculpted figures for the Scooby-Doo movies, for the monsters and all kinds of stuff, so she’s very handy to have around, to say the least. Also, I worked with another sculptor named Mike Jones, who has sculpted some things for me, so I would do drawings, and somebody would sculpt up a figure, and then I could light the sculpture and be careful to light it the same way I lit the people I was shooting so that when I composited them together, they’d appear as seamless as possible. But I wanted everything to be photographic so it would look like it was the same so it would fit together.
ANDELMAN: Wow. See, I had no idea, and I imagine most people don’t know, that, looking at these, these are sculptures. These are not hand-drawn. I’m very surprised.
VON SHOLLY: By the way, you notice that it’s named Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Vaughn Bode went to Syracuse, where I went to college, and he came to our college once and talked, and I met him, and some other cartoonist friends of mine met him, and he told us, “Always put your name on everything. Put it big, and put it where they can’t crop it out.”
ANDELMAN: That goes all the way back to the Will Eisner school. Eisner was famous for putting his name on stuff when he worked for the military. So guys left the Army, thousands and thousands of guys left the Army, if they saw his work on PS magazine, they knew “Will Eisner” because his name was on everything.
VON SHOLLY: It’s only smart. My earliest favorite comic book people were John Stanley and Carl Barks, but I didn’t know who they were.
ANDELMAN: Right.
VON SHOLLY: I thought “Marge” did Little Lulu and Tubby, and I thought Walt Disney did Uncle Scrooge because those were the names that you saw. So I guess kind of with Marvel is when they started to give people credit.
ANDELMAN: It was a big thing for Stan Lee, of course, who was putting people’s names on things, and then of course years later, well, kind of overlooking the names.
VON SHOLLY: Well, he made sure to get his name on it.
ANDELMAN: Yeah. I don’t want to pick on Stan.
VON SHOLLY: No. I think that with Stan and Jack and Ditko and everybody else, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, or whatever that expression is. It took those guys together to do what they did.
ANDELMAN: There was another element of these comics that was familiar to me, and it reminded me of the little photo funnies from the National Lampoon thirty years ago. Is that possibly an influence?
VON SHOLLY: It’s an influence, but so is Help! magazine. Terry Gilliam used to do fumettis. Fumetti is, of course, for people who don’t know, is when you use photographs with word balloons, like comics, and Terry Gilliam did some for Help! Magazine. One really funny story had John Cleese in it, way before Monty Python. So fumetti is nothing new. I thought I had actually invented something completely new when I did these stories, when I did Morbid, and I showed Sergio Aragones, and he went, “Ah, fumetti!” “Oh shit, that’s right, fumetti. I guess I didn’t invent this.” I thought I did, but I guess I didn’t. Remember, Robert Crumb did them in Weirdo?
ANDELMAN: Uh-huh.
VON SHOLLY: The fumettis that I had seen involved usually people would pose and take pictures and stick word balloons on them, so the degree of manipulation of the pieces is what’s different with what I do.
ANDELMAN: Right. Well, I always thought when National Lampoon did it in the ’70s it was just the way to sneak more topless women into the magazine.
VON SHOLLY: Nothing wrong with that.
ANDELMAN: I was always for that, and actually that brings me to another question. There are plenty of busty babes in your work, real live models, not hand-drawn. Where do you find them, and what do you tell them they’re going to be used for?
VON SHOLLY: You find them working at the 7-Eleven, in work situations, any casual social situation. It’s a casting sort of consideration, but many things can drive the creation of a story. But I just ask people, and you’d be surprised how many of them agree. First of all, I draw all the stories first, and so I’ve got pencil drawings of everything. So when I go and get you, Bob Andelman, to be in my story, I know the pictures I’m going to need, I know what the light source is, and outside of maybe two or three changes of costume if the story dictates that, I don’t need to take up a whole hell of a lot of your time. I can tell people, “I only need you for an hour or two. I’ll pay you a little bit if I have to,” and they think it sounds like fun. They think it sounds interesting, and you’d be surprised how many people are happy to do it just by the asking.
ANDELMAN: A few years ago, you also produced in a slightly different genre but related, monster magazine’s spoofs. Do I have this right? Is the full title Crazy, Hip, Groovy, Go-Go Way Out Monsters?
VON SHOLLY: It is. And you know, I put those words at the top of the logo. This was an imitation of crass commercialism in ’50s and ’60s monster magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland being the prototype for all that. But when people were trying to sell to the kids, they’d write “Crazy!” “Groovy!” “Hip!” “Go! Go!” Way Out!” They’d just throw words like that at it. Old square people trying to sound cool. And I just slapped a bunch of those words up across the cover meaning that this was what the publisher would be trying to tell you. And John Morrow, the actual publisher in this case, said, well, why don’t we just call it that? I wanted to call it “Shitload of Monsters,” but he wouldn’t do that.
ANDELMAN: Wouldn’t go for that, huh?
VON SHOLLY: No, strangely enough.
ANDELMAN: And so these are still available from Twomorrow’s Publishing.
VON SHOLLY: Right.
ANDELMAN: How many of these were there?
VON SHOLLY: Just two.
ANDELMAN: Oh, there were just the two. Okay. They’re a take-off on the old Famous Monsters of Filmland and that whole type of thing, right?
VON SHOLLY: Yes. There was a whole barrage of magazines that tried to jump on that bandwagon, and this is sort of a lampoon of all of that. We make some jokes about Ray Harryhausen in it. I love Ray Harryhausen. He was a great inspiration to me so this is, hopefully, it’s all good natured and not taken in the wrong spirit by anybody. But you cannot do a magazine like that without having Forrey Ackerman and Ray Harryhausen in it and maybe Ray Bradbury, some of the people that were always in your face in those magazines.
ANDELMAN: I love the cover line of these, things like, “Stills that were too crummy for the studios,” “Ads and promos disguised as news,” “Boring stills of people standing around,” and of course, the thing that Jim Warren was famous for, endless ads for weird, cheap garbage you may never even get.
VON SHOLLY: It just all flowed naturally, you know. But I love those magazines. It sounds like I’m making fun of them, but I think anything can be ribbed.
ANDELMAN: I know you want to talk about dinosaurs, so let’s talk about dinosaurs. You like to mix them up in your work, combining dinosaurs with real people, which I’m thinking is a little bit Jurassic Park, which is your film background, but it’s also a little bit of creationism, too. Do you want to touch on that a little bit?
VON SHOLLY: Well, The Lost World, by Conan Doyle, might be one of the first and one of my favorite books involving the survival of dinosaurs into our times. There’s really nothing new about that in fiction. I don’t think of it as having anything to do with creationism myself. I think anybody who looks at the fossil record and looks at science will find that that’s just absurd to think that that’s literal creationism. No, I don’t. I just look for any excuse to draw and paint dinosaurs.
ANDELMAN: Why? What is it about dinosaurs?
VON SHOLLY: Well, there’s a good question. Why do people like cars, or why do people like horses? There’s this great musician, Tay Zonday, who’s on YouTube who did “Chocolate Rain,” and he’s done a lot of really incredible music. He’s a singer/songwriter who plays the piano. He’s just an amazing guy who’s on YouTube, and somebody asked him, “Why did you become a musician?” That’s kind of a dumb question, but his response was, it included the question well, “Why did you become silent?” which I thought was a great question because don’t we all start out singing and drawing with crayons making pictures and doing stuff, and we all do that when we’re little, and some of us stop, and some of us stay with it, and it’s kind of like we all like dinosaurs, I think, when we’re kids. All kids go through a dinosaur phase. Some never get over it. Maybe it’s arrested development of some kind. I don’t know. I still love dinosaurs. I still love comic books. I still love rock and roll music. I like the things that I liked when I was little. Those things inspired me. I loved artwork with dinosaurs. This guy, Mo Gollub, that painted the Turok covers that were a big highlight of my comic-book-reading youth. Particularly, the 13 covers that Mo Gollub did were fantastic, and so you see that, and there’s just something exciting about it that makes you want to do it, too. I wanted to do that, and I am still there.
ANDELMAN: What you’d really like is to be able to take your pet dinosaur for a walk around the block, wouldn’t you?
VON SHOLLY: Oh, indeed. But the movie Prehysteria was kind of like that. That was a movie I made up and sold to this, let’s not get libelous here, this fellow named Charlie Band who made a movie, made three movies based on the concept, but it was about a kid with pet dinosaurs.
ANDELMAN: I want to use that as a segue. I want to talk about your film work. Tell folks about some of the other films you’ve worked on. I think you’ve mentioned Prehysteria and Dinosaur, and I think in the opening I mentioned Mars Attacks! and The Shawshank Redemption. What are some of the other films you’ve worked on?
VON SHOLLY: I’ve done all of Frank Darabont’s movies so far, The Mist and The Green Mile and even The Majestic, some stuff for that, plus his first movie, Buried Alive. Then there was Darkman, which was really fun because that was kind of a comic book, and Sam Raimi is a riot to work with. I worked on a lot of crappy movies; they pay just the same as the good movies, and there are so many more of them (laughs).
ANDELMAN: Didn’t you work on Tim Burton’s unproduced “Superman” movie?
VON SHOLLY: I did. I was basically called in to draw monsters. Brainiac, I guess, was going to have like a monster zoo on his spaceship, and I guess they weren’t happy with the monsters that they were getting, and so a friend of mine recommended me, and I worked for just a few weeks. And Tim Burton came in one day, and I knew him from Mars Attacks! and from James and the Giant Peach, and he looked at the monsters, and he said, “I love your monsters, Pete.” I said, “Oh, thank you.” And he said the most fun he ever had was drawing monsters at Disney when he was young, early in his career, I mean. So I was just kind of brought in to do that.
ANDELMAN: And you mentioned James and the Giant Peach, which is another Burton film. Some of these guys like Burton and Darabont that you’ve worked with a couple of times. How does that take shape?
VON SHOLLY: It’s quite different actually. When I started doing storyboards and as part of the segue, if I may, I said I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I couldn’t make any money cause I was no good. But it was something I wanted to do. And then when I saw storyboards, I didn’t know what storyboards were up until I moved to California from upstate New York after meeting Vaughn Bode and all that and met a lot of people out here who did comics and stuff. And still, even though there was George DiCaprio, Leonardo’s father, was a great, great help, and Vaughn Bode introduced him, and he helped look out for us. But I saw storyboards, and I thought that looks kind of like comics. Maybe I could learn to do that. And a lot of people get into animation, I think, who find that here’s a place an artist can make a living, and there’s not that many. So I got into doing storyboards cause they looked kind of like comics, and then you have to learn about film and the differences between film and comics. But when I started with Frank Darabont and a few other people, it was more one on one like you sit down with the director and have a meeting. And what I liked to do was take pencil and paper and sketch, and the director describes the shots that he wants, and sometimes directors want your input and sometimes they know what they want, and they’re not really looking for input. You figure that out really quick. On the bigger movies and on feature animation, it’s more of a team kind of thing. There’s less interaction with the directors, which I think is a shame, and it’s not as much fun. Mars Attacks!, there were three of us doing storyboards, and one guy interacted, Michael Jackson his name is, great, great guy, great friend, great artist. He was sort of Tim Burton’s guy so he would be the one having the meetings, and then he would tell us. He would give us the feedback. On The Mist, that was just like old times with Frank, which is just the two of us sitting down talking, drawing, having fun. So different directors have different approaches.
ANDELMAN: Tell me about you and Darabont. You worked on Shawshank, which is rather unlike a lot of these other films.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah. Storyboarding, as a process, usually involves stunts and special effects. And so on Shawshank, there wasn’t that many of those. There was an opening helicopter shot, and there were some shots that were going to involve wire removal and things where people got dangled off of roofs and dropped off of tiers in prisons and things. We went to Ohio and went to the actual prison that they used for the exteriors. Every now and then you travel, too, which is a side thing, but it’s a fun thing about storyboarding. But movies like The Shawshank Redemption don’t usually require as much storyboarding as something like The Mist because it’s mostly for special effects.
ANDELMAN: Do you have any other Darabont stuff coming up?
VON SHOLLY: Well, he’s supposed to do Fahrenheit 451. I don’t know how much storyboarding there will be in that. I’m not in touch with Frank so much outside of working arrangements.
ANDELMAN: Okay. Go ahead.
VON SHOLLY: A lot of people are busy, so when they need you, they call you.
ANDELMAN: I understand.
VON SHOLLY: And when you’re done, it’s not rudeness or unfriendliness, they’re on to the next thing.
ANDELMAN: Of course. No, I understand that completely. Now, your latest storyboards were for a film called Superhero, which is, I gather, in the satire form of Airplane. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
VON SHOLLY: Yeah. That’s the group of people that’s been doing the Scary Movie films, and Leslie Nielsen is in it, and that was more like it. I was talking about how some of these things are done in little teams of storyboard artists working individually where the directors will cherry-pick the shots that they like. If you come up with an idea, they’ll, “Oh, I like that. We’ll use that.” Superhero was like the old days where it was me and the director, Craig Mazin, and we would be sometimes down at the set. He would say, “Come to the set. We’re shooting Monday at this high school gymnasium and show up there at noon, and at lunchtime, I’ll take a break and draw with ya.” We would really knock out the stuff, but it was like being in the trenches. There was no time…Feature film animation is this big, long, rambling process where you try things and throw things out and start over again. I don’t really like it that much. This is a lot more fun because it’s immediate. And David Zucker is the producer and Robert Weiss, and they’ve produced a ton of big movies. It’s going to be very much the same kind of tone with a gag every couple seconds, but it’s like Spider-man and Batman, all the superhero movies that have been made lately. It’s kind of like they combine them all into one spoof. Should be pretty funny.
ANDELMAN: Sounds like fun.
VON SHOLLY: There’s a scene where the young hero character — like Batman or Spider-Man, he blames himself for the death of his parents, and a hoodlum holds them up. They’re coming out of the theater at night in a dark alley, and a hoodlum holds them up, and the kid goes and grabs the gun and accidentally shoots his father and drops his gun on the ground and shoots his mother. And he’s talking as a flashback about, “I always blamed myself for their deaths,” and in fact, it’s totally his fault. So that’s an example of one of the scenes that could play pretty funny.
ANDELMAN: Pete, in all of your comic and cartoon work, but most of all that I’ve seen, there’s some common thread that I think must date back to EC Comics. Were you an EC guy?
VON SHOLLY: I was too young, really. I was born in 1950, and that’s a handy year to be born when it comes to remembering how old you were when things happened. But EC Comics were just ahead of me, but I had an older brother who had some so I was fortunate enough to get a glancing blow with those. But they were scary. That’s what I remember about them, especially Graham Ingels. When you’re a little kid, they’re terrifying. The first cartoonists that I knew about by name were Charles Adams and Dr. Seuss.
ANDELMAN: Ah. Very different.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah, but I loved both of them, and we had some Charles Adams books around the house. And I used to love Dr. Seuss, especially McElligot’s Pool, which was in color which was kind of unusual. But those were real early influences. I didn’t really find out about EC Comics, to get back to your question, until much later when they started to reprint them.
ANDELMAN: Is it wrong to assume you’re a fan of horror comics.
VON SHOLLY: Oh no. I just didn’t grow up on those. There weren’t that many available to me, but the influence of EC Comics is so pervasive. I started, when Creepy came out, they had several of the EC artists, of course, in Eerie, the Warren Publications. So that was my EC Comics experience and in a way was sort of the second generation of those.
ANDELMAN: Dark Horse has published a number of collections of your work, which you kind of referenced earlier. They include Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Along that same line, are there any kind of inner demons you’d like to expose now on Mr. Media? Do you want to tell us any issues you’d like to tell us about?
VON SHOLLY: I like H.P. Lovecraft; I like horror stories. And I originally wanted to do Morbid as a horror magazine, and I couldn’t believe no one had used the name “Morbid” because they’ve got creepy, spooky, eerie, every ghastly, every word you can think of had been used to death but not morbid. But what happened is I started making these stories, and they didn’t want to be morbid all the time. They wanted to be funny so the thing kind of went its own way.
ANDELMAN: Are there more of them coming?
VON SHOLLY: I have more if somebody wants to publish them. I enjoy doing them. I did about 400 pages of stuff. I just get involved in a project and go barreling ahead with it whether I know it’s gonna get published or not. So I’ve got more material. Dark Horse, I don’t think they sold that well, to be honest. I think they sold okay, but times are a little tougher, and the comic book market is tough.
ANDELMAN: These books are somewhat different style than Capitol Hell. For example, I’m looking at Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid Two: Dead But Not Out!, and you’ve got this incredibly hideous creature with multiple heads. They’re all dead, but they’re alive, zombie-like, chasing after this rather buxom young lady in a bikini, a common thread also, and in the stories, you’ve got live actors responding to things in a very Hollywood-style, and you’ve drawn in, I guess. I wondered: are these drawn? Are these watercolored? What is the style?
VON SHOLLY: The monsters are sculptures. They’re three-dimensional sculptures. My wife is a fabulous sculptor, Andrea Von Sholly, and she’s sculpted a lot of them. We made some movies called Prehysteria, and she sculpted the dinosaurs for those, and she’s sculpted figures for the Scooby-Doo movies, for the monsters and all kinds of stuff, so she’s very handy to have around, to say the least. Also, I worked with another sculptor named Mike Jones, who has sculpted some things for me, so I would do drawings, and somebody would sculpt up a figure, and then I could light the sculpture and be careful to light it the same way I lit the people I was shooting so that when I composited them together, they’d appear as seamless as possible. But I wanted everything to be photographic so it would look like it was the same so it would fit together.
ANDELMAN: Wow. See, I had no idea, and I imagine most people don’t know, that, looking at these, these are sculptures. These are not hand-drawn. I’m very surprised.
VON SHOLLY: By the way, you notice that it’s named Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Vaughn Bode went to Syracuse, where I went to college, and he came to our college once and talked, and I met him, and some other cartoonist friends of mine met him, and he told us, “Always put your name on everything. Put it big, and put it where they can’t crop it out.”
ANDELMAN: That goes all the way back to the Will Eisner school. Eisner was famous for putting his name on stuff when he worked for the military. So guys left the Army, thousands and thousands of guys left the Army, if they saw his work on PS magazine, they knew “Will Eisner” because his name was on everything.
VON SHOLLY: It’s only smart. My earliest favorite comic book people were John Stanley and Carl Barks, but I didn’t know who they were.
ANDELMAN: Right.
VON SHOLLY: I thought “Marge” did Little Lulu and Tubby, and I thought Walt Disney did Uncle Scrooge because those were the names that you saw. So I guess kind of with Marvel is when they started to give people credit.
ANDELMAN: It was a big thing for Stan Lee, of course, who was putting people’s names on things, and then of course years later, well, kind of overlooking the names.
VON SHOLLY: Well, he made sure to get his name on it.
ANDELMAN: Yeah. I don’t want to pick on Stan.
VON SHOLLY: No. I think that with Stan and Jack and Ditko and everybody else, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, or whatever that expression is. It took those guys together to do what they did.
ANDELMAN: There was another element of these comics that was familiar to me, and it reminded me of the little photo funnies from the National Lampoon thirty years ago. Is that possibly an influence?
VON SHOLLY: It’s an influence, but so is Help! magazine. Terry Gilliam used to do fumettis. Fumetti is, of course, for people who don’t know, is when you use photographs with word balloons, like comics, and Terry Gilliam did some for Help! Magazine. One really funny story had John Cleese in it, way before Monty Python. So fumetti is nothing new. I thought I had actually invented something completely new when I did these stories, when I did Morbid, and I showed Sergio Aragones, and he went, “Ah, fumetti!” “Oh shit, that’s right, fumetti. I guess I didn’t invent this.” I thought I did, but I guess I didn’t. Remember, Robert Crumb did them in Weirdo?
ANDELMAN: Uh-huh.
VON SHOLLY: The fumettis that I had seen involved usually people would pose and take pictures and stick word balloons on them, so the degree of manipulation of the pieces is what’s different with what I do.
ANDELMAN: Right. Well, I always thought when National Lampoon did it in the ’70s it was just the way to sneak more topless women into the magazine.
VON SHOLLY: Nothing wrong with that.
ANDELMAN: I was always for that, and actually that brings me to another question. There are plenty of busty babes in your work, real live models, not hand-drawn. Where do you find them, and what do you tell them they’re going to be used for?
VON SHOLLY: You find them working at the 7-Eleven, in work situations, any casual social situation. It’s a casting sort of consideration, but many things can drive the creation of a story. But I just ask people, and you’d be surprised how many of them agree. First of all, I draw all the stories first, and so I’ve got pencil drawings of everything. So when I go and get you, Bob Andelman, to be in my story, I know the pictures I’m going to need, I know what the light source is, and outside of maybe two or three changes of costume if the story dictates that, I don’t need to take up a whole hell of a lot of your time. I can tell people, “I only need you for an hour or two. I’ll pay you a little bit if I have to,” and they think it sounds like fun. They think it sounds interesting, and you’d be surprised how many people are happy to do it just by the asking.
ANDELMAN: A few years ago, you also produced in a slightly different genre but related, monster magazine’s spoofs. Do I have this right? Is the full title Crazy, Hip, Groovy, Go-Go Way Out Monsters?
VON SHOLLY: It is. And you know, I put those words at the top of the logo. This was an imitation of crass commercialism in ’50s and ’60s monster magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland being the prototype for all that. But when people were trying to sell to the kids, they’d write “Crazy!” “Groovy!” “Hip!” “Go! Go!” Way Out!” They’d just throw words like that at it. Old square people trying to sound cool. And I just slapped a bunch of those words up across the cover meaning that this was what the publisher would be trying to tell you. And John Morrow, the actual publisher in this case, said, well, why don’t we just call it that? I wanted to call it “Shitload of Monsters,” but he wouldn’t do that.
ANDELMAN: Wouldn’t go for that, huh?
VON SHOLLY: No, strangely enough.
ANDELMAN: And so these are still available from Twomorrow’s Publishing.
VON SHOLLY: Right.
ANDELMAN: How many of these were there?
VON SHOLLY: Just two.
ANDELMAN: Oh, there were just the two. Okay. They’re a take-off on the old Famous Monsters of Filmland and that whole type of thing, right?
VON SHOLLY: Yes. There was a whole barrage of magazines that tried to jump on that bandwagon, and this is sort of a lampoon of all of that. We make some jokes about Ray Harryhausen in it. I love Ray Harryhausen. He was a great inspiration to me so this is, hopefully, it’s all good natured and not taken in the wrong spirit by anybody. But you cannot do a magazine like that without having Forrey Ackerman and Ray Harryhausen in it and maybe Ray Bradbury, some of the people that were always in your face in those magazines.
ANDELMAN: I love the cover line of these, things like, “Stills that were too crummy for the studios,” “Ads and promos disguised as news,” “Boring stills of people standing around,” and of course, the thing that Jim Warren was famous for, endless ads for weird, cheap garbage you may never even get.
VON SHOLLY: It just all flowed naturally, you know. But I love those magazines. It sounds like I’m making fun of them, but I think anything can be ribbed.
ANDELMAN: I know you want to talk about dinosaurs, so let’s talk about dinosaurs. You like to mix them up in your work, combining dinosaurs with real people, which I’m thinking is a little bit Jurassic Park, which is your film background, but it’s also a little bit of creationism, too. Do you want to touch on that a little bit?
VON SHOLLY: Well, The Lost World, by Conan Doyle, might be one of the first and one of my favorite books involving the survival of dinosaurs into our times. There’s really nothing new about that in fiction. I don’t think of it as having anything to do with creationism myself. I think anybody who looks at the fossil record and looks at science will find that that’s just absurd to think that that’s literal creationism. No, I don’t. I just look for any excuse to draw and paint dinosaurs.
ANDELMAN: Why? What is it about dinosaurs?
VON SHOLLY: Well, there’s a good question. Why do people like cars, or why do people like horses? There’s this great musician, Tay Zonday, who’s on YouTube who did “Chocolate Rain,” and he’s done a lot of really incredible music. He’s a singer/songwriter who plays the piano. He’s just an amazing guy who’s on YouTube, and somebody asked him, “Why did you become a musician?” That’s kind of a dumb question, but his response was, it included the question well, “Why did you become silent?” which I thought was a great question because don’t we all start out singing and drawing with crayons making pictures and doing stuff, and we all do that when we’re little, and some of us stop, and some of us stay with it, and it’s kind of like we all like dinosaurs, I think, when we’re kids. All kids go through a dinosaur phase. Some never get over it. Maybe it’s arrested development of some kind. I don’t know. I still love dinosaurs. I still love comic books. I still love rock and roll music. I like the things that I liked when I was little. Those things inspired me. I loved artwork with dinosaurs. This guy, Mo Gollub, that painted the Turok covers that were a big highlight of my comic-book-reading youth. Particularly, the 13 covers that Mo Gollub did were fantastic, and so you see that, and there’s just something exciting about it that makes you want to do it, too. I wanted to do that, and I am still there.
ANDELMAN: What you’d really like is to be able to take your pet dinosaur for a walk around the block, wouldn’t you?
VON SHOLLY: Oh, indeed. But the movie Prehysteria was kind of like that. That was a movie I made up and sold to this, let’s not get libelous here, this fellow named Charlie Band who made a movie, made three movies based on the concept, but it was about a kid with pet dinosaurs.
ANDELMAN: I want to use that as a segue. I want to talk about your film work. Tell folks about some of the other films you’ve worked on. I think you’ve mentioned Prehysteria and Dinosaur, and I think in the opening I mentioned Mars Attacks! and The Shawshank Redemption. What are some of the other films you’ve worked on?
VON SHOLLY: I’ve done all of Frank Darabont’s movies so far, The Mist and The Green Mile and even The Majestic, some stuff for that, plus his first movie, Buried Alive. Then there was Darkman, which was really fun because that was kind of a comic book, and Sam Raimi is a riot to work with. I worked on a lot of crappy movies; they pay just the same as the good movies, and there are so many more of them (laughs).
ANDELMAN: Didn’t you work on Tim Burton’s unproduced “Superman” movie?
VON SHOLLY: I did. I was basically called in to draw monsters. Brainiac, I guess, was going to have like a monster zoo on his spaceship, and I guess they weren’t happy with the monsters that they were getting, and so a friend of mine recommended me, and I worked for just a few weeks. And Tim Burton came in one day, and I knew him from Mars Attacks! and from James and the Giant Peach, and he looked at the monsters, and he said, “I love your monsters, Pete.” I said, “Oh, thank you.” And he said the most fun he ever had was drawing monsters at Disney when he was young, early in his career, I mean. So I was just kind of brought in to do that.
ANDELMAN: And you mentioned James and the Giant Peach, which is another Burton film. Some of these guys like Burton and Darabont that you’ve worked with a couple of times. How does that take shape?
VON SHOLLY: It’s quite different actually. When I started doing storyboards and as part of the segue, if I may, I said I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I couldn’t make any money cause I was no good. But it was something I wanted to do. And then when I saw storyboards, I didn’t know what storyboards were up until I moved to California from upstate New York after meeting Vaughn Bode and all that and met a lot of people out here who did comics and stuff. And still, even though there was George DiCaprio, Leonardo’s father, was a great, great help, and Vaughn Bode introduced him, and he helped look out for us. But I saw storyboards, and I thought that looks kind of like comics. Maybe I could learn to do that. And a lot of people get into animation, I think, who find that here’s a place an artist can make a living, and there’s not that many. So I got into doing storyboards cause they looked kind of like comics, and then you have to learn about film and the differences between film and comics. But when I started with Frank Darabont and a few other people, it was more one on one like you sit down with the director and have a meeting. And what I liked to do was take pencil and paper and sketch, and the director describes the shots that he wants, and sometimes directors want your input and sometimes they know what they want, and they’re not really looking for input. You figure that out really quick. On the bigger movies and on feature animation, it’s more of a team kind of thing. There’s less interaction with the directors, which I think is a shame, and it’s not as much fun. Mars Attacks!, there were three of us doing storyboards, and one guy interacted, Michael Jackson his name is, great, great guy, great friend, great artist. He was sort of Tim Burton’s guy so he would be the one having the meetings, and then he would tell us. He would give us the feedback. On The Mist, that was just like old times with Frank, which is just the two of us sitting down talking, drawing, having fun. So different directors have different approaches.
ANDELMAN: Tell me about you and Darabont. You worked on Shawshank, which is rather unlike a lot of these other films.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah. Storyboarding, as a process, usually involves stunts and special effects. And so on Shawshank, there wasn’t that many of those. There was an opening helicopter shot, and there were some shots that were going to involve wire removal and things where people got dangled off of roofs and dropped off of tiers in prisons and things. We went to Ohio and went to the actual prison that they used for the exteriors. Every now and then you travel, too, which is a side thing, but it’s a fun thing about storyboarding. But movies like The Shawshank Redemption don’t usually require as much storyboarding as something like The Mist because it’s mostly for special effects.
ANDELMAN: Do you have any other Darabont stuff coming up?
VON SHOLLY: Well, he’s supposed to do Fahrenheit 451. I don’t know how much storyboarding there will be in that. I’m not in touch with Frank so much outside of working arrangements.
ANDELMAN: Okay. Go ahead.
VON SHOLLY: A lot of people are busy, so when they need you, they call you.
ANDELMAN: I understand.
VON SHOLLY: And when you’re done, it’s not rudeness or unfriendliness, they’re on to the next thing.
ANDELMAN: Of course. No, I understand that completely. Now, your latest storyboards were for a film called Superhero, which is, I gather, in the satire form of Airplane. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
VON SHOLLY: Yeah. That’s the group of people that’s been doing the Scary Movie films, and Leslie Nielsen is in it, and that was more like it. I was talking about how some of these things are done in little teams of storyboard artists working individually where the directors will cherry-pick the shots that they like. If you come up with an idea, they’ll, “Oh, I like that. We’ll use that.” Superhero was like the old days where it was me and the director, Craig Mazin, and we would be sometimes down at the set. He would say, “Come to the set. We’re shooting Monday at this high school gymnasium and show up there at noon, and at lunchtime, I’ll take a break and draw with ya.” We would really knock out the stuff, but it was like being in the trenches. There was no time…Feature film animation is this big, long, rambling process where you try things and throw things out and start over again. I don’t really like it that much. This is a lot more fun because it’s immediate. And David Zucker is the producer and Robert Weiss, and they’ve produced a ton of big movies. It’s going to be very much the same kind of tone with a gag every couple seconds, but it’s like Spider-man and Batman, all the superhero movies that have been made lately. It’s kind of like they combine them all into one spoof. Should be pretty funny.
ANDELMAN: Sounds like fun.
VON SHOLLY: There’s a scene where the young hero character — like Batman or Spider-Man, he blames himself for the death of his parents, and a hoodlum holds them up. They’re coming out of the theater at night in a dark alley, and a hoodlum holds them up, and the kid goes and grabs the gun and accidentally shoots his father and drops his gun on the ground and shoots his mother. And he’s talking as a flashback about, “I always blamed myself for their deaths,” and in fact, it’s totally his fault. So that’s an example of one of the scenes that could play pretty funny.
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