Some pencil drawings of Carla Tofano – life drawing supermodel, journalist, podcaster and tarot card reader. Based on a video from her Instagram feed.

Here’s the full page of drawings… if you’d like to purchase the original, make me an offer.

I count myself a lucky person to have drawn Carla several times during her time in London. See the results here.

A page of recent pencil studies of glamorous Norwegian actress Julie Ege, who appeared in many British films during the 1960s and 1970s, including On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Up Pompeii, Not Now Darling, and Creatures the World Forgot. As ever with our portraits, the likeness to the subject is debatable.

You can find the source photos in this Getty images gallery.

While hunting for undemanding entertainment in my Amazon Prime watchlist the other night, I found myself drawn to The Black Scorpion (1957).

The striking, almost abstract, black blob with lopsided fangs that dominates the movie’s poster was familiar to me from various appearances in The Dark Side Magazine – although I’m not sure I realised the shape was supposed to represent a scorpion. I think I’ve even drawn it at some point, in one of my monster-themed sketchbook spreads, though I can’t find any evidence of that right now. Perhaps in truth I was subconsciously attracted to the image because I too have one fang.

The poster set me up to expect a Roger Corman-style cheapie, where half the fun is enjoying the oddball make-do designs for the man-in-a-suit monsters. (A notorious example being the goggle-eyed heap that gives Creature from the Haunted Sea its name.)

But when the opening library footage of an erupting volcano gave way to breathtaking shots of Mexican landscapes and lava formations, it became apparent this had been made on a grander scale and with a keener aesthetic eye than most ’50s B-movies.

My attempts to take screenshots were sadly thwarted by IP-protection technology but I could easily have filled this post with striking images and let them speak for themselves. Who was the cinematographer? Lionel Lindon, who would go on to shoot Around the World in 80 Days and The Manchurian Candidate.

Square-jawed Richard Denning (Creature from the Black Lagoon) and high-cheekboned Carlos Rivas (The King and I) play the geologists investigating the eruption. En route to the volcano they happen across a deserted gas station – deserted, that is, apart from an unaccompanied baby and a dead policeman, who is frozen in horror having unloaded his revolver at an unknown assailant.

Denning and Rivas take the baby to the nearby village San Lorenzo, where they discover distressed locals on high alert for a ‘demon bull’ which has been destroying cattle and stoving in the bonnets of cars like they were paper maché.

The bull of course is revealed to be a giant, centuries-old, scorpion and, guess what, there is not just one as implied by the movie’s title, but a whole underground nest full of them, and that nest stretches all the way to Mexico City. Can you see where this story is going?

Along the way there’s an anodyne, no-stakes romantic subplot which is lifted only by the wry and urbane presence of Mara Corday (The Giant Claw), who would go on to be a Playboy Playmate the following year and a regular cast member in films directed by her friend Clint Eastwood.

But it’s the scorpions we want to see, and they were brought to life using stop motion animation by legendary effects maestro Willis O’Brien (King Kong), in his last movie before retiring. He also populated the underground cave with creatures left over from Kong‘s infamous cut spider pit scene.

As the scorpions terrorise Mexico City at the movie’s climax, a variety of resourceful process methods are used to superimpose them onto the streets, surprisingly effectively for the time if you’re willing to suspend disbelief and be swept along by the imagery. Far less successful are the overused closeups of a drooling scorpion puppet created by Wah Chung (The Time Machine), which are more likely to elicit laughter than abject terror. And they don’t even have the outsized fang of the creature in the poster.

But no worries, the finale is coming, with its stadium-set showdown between the last scorpion standing and the military. O’Brien unleashes absolute mayhem, with the creature grabbing helicopters out of the sky and slamming them to the ground and chucking tanks around like toys.

Are you sold? Don’t get me wrong, this is not half as good a film or story as Them! (1954). But it’s better than it has a right to be, and it can sure take the sting out of an empty evening.

The House of Harley team is busy auditioning supporting cast members for a new Lady Backenforth story, coming later this year to The Bugle.

Our Etsy shop is open again for a limited period, with a selection of our favourite comics, art books, CD-Rs and original drawings available for purchase.

Be quick though – it will shut again at midnight on Thursday 8th January. All orders will be sent out during the week of 5th January.

Classic Comics Press specialise in reprinting classic American comic strips in affordable print-on-demand packages. The House of Harley has been enjoying its bumper-sized Complete Collection of Kelly Green stories.

Kelly Green was a collaboration between two newspaper cartoonists – writer Leonard Starr (Mary Perkins on Stage) and artist Stan Drake (The Heart of Juliet Jones). They both achieved considerable success in the field but by the early ’80s working on ‘continuity’ newspaper strips – in which a story was serialised a few panels a day over many months – had become a thankless task, due to competition from faster-moving TV soap operas and reduced print sizes, which did a disserve to any detail in the drawings.

But both Starr and Drake’s work was popular in Europe thanks to syndication, and the idea of creating for that continent’s extensive adult comics market (all-but-non-existent in the US at the time) appealed to them. Starr pitched the idea for Kelly Green to Dargaud and the duo were commissioned to make a series of colour books, all of which are reprinted here in crisp black and white, including one which has never been published in English before.

Kelly is the wife of a cop who dies in the course of his duty on page 1 of the first story. To earn a living she becomes a ‘go-between’, an occupation I was not aware of but I suppose it makes sense that when a crook demands a ransom for a stolen artwork or a kidnapped daughter, a neutral party might be paid to make the exchange. Either way, it won’t surprise any follower of crime fiction to learn that the deals Kelly has to navigate are never what they seem. And from there the stories unfold.

We learn very quickly that Kelly is a tough and resourceful cookie, who has picked up the tricks of the trade from her husband and is well placed to deal with the shady and duplicitous characters she encounters in the course of her work. It is also strongly suggested that she took the job to preserve a sense of danger and excitement in her life.

Kelly’s job takes her from one US city to another, all depicted in carefully researched and observed detail, with artist Drake making extensive use of models and photographic reference. He and Starr attributed a sizable chunk of the strip’s appeal to the sense of exoticism it provided for a European public, who at the time were in awe of Hollywood and all things American…

Occasionally the reliance on photo reference gives Drake’s panels a stiff, collaged look – and on those occasions it doesn’t flow quite like a comic should, it stops the reader in their tracks. See a couple of examples below…

But most of the book is a delight of vibrant life and movement. Look at how Drake draws Kelly’s flowing hair, which is almost a character in its own right, such is the attention it gets.

And only a blind person could ignore the enthusiasm with which Kelly was drawn by Drake, who took every opportunity to depict her and her supporting cast in far more risqué situations than were permitted in US newspaper strips.

All of which lovingly crafted storytelling goes into creating a comic strip cocktail of crooked cops, peeping toms, disappearing rock stars, spoilt rich kids, exploding cars, death by swimming pool, estranged families, fake suicide, a plane crash in a blizzard, dog thieves, casinos and topless bars, a cross-dressing disguise, a deadly game of golf, a millionaire in a wheelchair, an angry bear, a political assassination and a comic convention (!).

There’s five highly entertaining stories spread across this 264-page collection, which is half the size and weight of an old telephone directory – just the right heft to deliver a sharp crack to a blackmailer’s skull and make them regret they ever tangled with you.

Kelly Green: The Complete Collection is available from Classic Comics Press.