Today is the theatrical debut of Meg 2: The Trench, the follow-up to the surprisingly popular 2018 giant-shark movie in which action star Jason Statham (The Fast and the Furious and Expendables franchises) fought two megalodons; this time, he’s got a whole aquarium full of giant underwater monsters to battle!
You know who else has had an encounter with a megalodon? Our friend Bob Larkin, who’s spent a four-decade career painting all manner of colossal beasts from beneath the sea—as well as from outer space!—in a host of covers and movie posters for just about every publishing house and film studio.
Doc Savage, Dazzler, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, Piranha, Night of the Creeps, Humanoids from the Deep, and Godzilla are just some of the painted images you’re already familiar with, even if you didn’t know they were Larkin’s work. He’s been an inspiration to artists like Joe Jusko and Alex Ross. For us here at StarWarp Concepts, Bob was the cover artist of my Saga of Pandora Zwieback novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign.
Bob’s connection to The Meg is that he was a cover artist for one of the printings of The Trench, author Steve Alten’s follow-up novel to his 1997 bestseller Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, and the basis for Statham’s Meg 2: The Trench—which means Bob got to paint a giant shark!
What you see here are the original painting and its final printed version. As to why the book has a reversed color scheme, Bob explained it this way to me:
“[The original painting] is what the art director and author wanted: an all-white shark with big teeth, in color. But then they decided to make the shark negative with the red eye; I couldn’t understand why. Scarier? They’re both scarier, to a degree. I did the painting in 1999 and didn’t sign it, like a lot of my rush covers.”
Impressive, right? But like we always say around here, it’s not just his painting skills that are impressive—Bob’s also one hell of a pencil artist, as evidenced by his work in a couple of SWC projects. Cut the shameless plugs!
The Bob Larkin Sketchbook is a collection of some of Bob’s incredible pencil drawings, and what you’ll discover when you see them is how wide-ranging his subjects are. Sci-fi, horror, Westerns, pulp adventure, crime fiction, movie merchandise, even wrestling stars—as we say on the book’s back cover, there really islittle that he hasn’t painted.
The sketchbook also features three pieces created especially for it: the Pandora Zwieback cover art; a portrait of Patricia Savage, the fightin’ cousin of pulp fiction’s top-tier adventurer, Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze; and a two-page spread in which Doc faces off against another Golden Age crimefighter—The Shadow!
And in From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures, by Steven A. Roman (that’s me!), Bob provides a wonderful pencil-study frontispiece of the queen of comics’ bad girls. From the Stars is a nonfiction history of Vampirella that takes an extensive look at her early days, from the debut of her series in 1969 to the death of Warren Publishing in 1983. In addition to telling the tale of Hammer’s unproduced film adaptation that was to star Barbara Leigh and Peter Cushing, I provide an in-depth guide to all her Warren stories; a checklist of all her Warren appearances (plus the publications from Harris Comics and Dynamite Entertainment that reprinted her Warren adventures); an overview of the six novelizations by pulp sci-fi author Ron Goulart that were published in the 1970s by Warner Books; and a look at the awful 1996 direct-to-cable-TV movie that was made, starring Talisa Soto and Roger Daltrey. There’s also a peek at Mr. Cushing’s personal copy of the ’70s Vampirella screenplay; a foreword by Official Vampirella Historian Sean Fernald, and photographs from the personal archives of Forrest J Ackerman.
The Bob Larkin Sketchbook and From the Stars…a Vampiress: An Unauthorized Guide to Vampirella’s Classic Horror Adventures are available in print and digital formats. Visit their respective product pages for ordering information.
