Zeno Pirone

Abysm of Ages

In which Richard Owen awakens from his horrible nightmare.

The separation of God from science was a difficult prospect for Victorian biologists, having lived safe in the comfort of knowing that God made all things and all things had been around since God made them. Discovering that God had, in fact, seemingly not only ...

Abysm of Ages

As soon as a second massive terrestrial reptile was discovered, the Victorian paleoartists decided the were at each other's throat every second of the day.

Megalosaurus was the first therapod described by science at the time, and though it's been overshadowed in modern popular consciousness by its larger cousi...

Abysm of Ages

Even Stegosaurus experienced a few incomprehensible reconstructions before those mighty plates were discovered a few years later and made the animal immediately iconic, cementing itself as a beacon of paleo pop-culture as early as 1912 in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World. Somehow they got even s...

Abysm of Ages

Hylaeosaurus' Victorian reconstructions seem to often be confused with Iguanodon to the untrained eye, an understandable mistake given the similarities in reconstruction at the time, though in reality, as modern science and later discoveries proved, they have very little in common visually, Hylaeosaurus bein...

Abysm of Ages

On New Year's Eve, 1853, sculptor and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins hosted a dinner celebrating the Crystal Palace Dinosaur statues unveiling inside a copy of one of that statues, that of an Iguanodon. Guests included many notable scientists and fledgling paleontologists of the day, most notably Richard Owen...

Abysm of Ages

Of course, the most famous of these outdated depictions of prehistoric beasts is the first one: Iguanodon was discovered in 1822, and later canonized as an extinct species in 1825 by Gideon and Mary Ann Mantell, geologists at the time, and was the first dinosaur formally described by Western sciences. Naturally they got the m...

Abysm of Ages

Laelaps, (now Dryptosaurus), was one of the first theropods to be discovered along with Megalosaurus. Unlike Meg, however, Laelaps was reconstructed fairly early on as being bipedal, already a step in the right direction in regards to the modern understanding of theropod anatomy.

The...

Abysm of Ages

Paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope accidentally reconstructed Elasmosaurus (now well understood to have it's head at the end of a long neck) as having a short neck and a comically long tail. At the time, he hadn't made the connection that Elasmosaurus was a member of the Plesiosaur family and thus followed their overall body ...

Abysm of Ages

It's kind of fascinating that, before the discovery of soft tissues indicated Ichthyosaurs had dorsal fins, Victorian depictions of the animal more or less resembled modern reconstructions of Mosasaurs, to which Ichthyosaurs aren't related, and predate evolutionarily by a few million years.

Modern reconstructions of Ic...

Abysm of Ages

The first panel of page three is a reference compositionally to Dore's The Deluge from an illustrated edition of the bible from 1866. Mostly just wanted to capture the roiling chaos of primeval, antediluvian seas with an image that is literally set during the flood that marked the end of the mythical biblical antedil...

Abysm of Ages

Been taking a Zat break with an exploration of Victorian paleoart, I think I'll be posting the colored versions here first, and mostly post

Been taking a Zat break with an exploration of Victorian paleoart, I think I'll be posting the colored versions here first, and mostly post publicly the sepia-toned versions that wi...

The Zat: Seadevil - finale

Sorry for such inconsistent gaps in uploading, the offline life is taking it's toll.

Zat's blood accidentally changed colors between pages, I guess I had one idea in mind and then switched absent-mindedly. This got fixed in the final TIFF pages.

Glad to have visited the undersea world of Atlantis, ...

The Zat: Seadevil

I've had some form of that Zat anatomy chart planned out for a while, it was nice to finally put it to paper

The Zat: Seadevil

Seadevil's real name, Lawrence, and Dorothy's name are borrowed from the Rachel Ingalls novel Mrs. Caliban, their last name also being a reference to said novel. If you haven't read it and enjoyed The Shape of Water, do so immediately. As decent as that film is, the emotional veracity of Ingalls' novel outcl...

The Zat: Seadevil

Before SECRET FILES even began printing I had this one in the chamber.

SEADEVIL came about because I knew I couldn't secure the (surprisingly still active) rights to defunct publisher Eclipse Comics' title SEADRAGON, about a Navy guy sealed into an experimental fish suit. The idea was too fun and campy not to play arou...

The Zat: Secret Files

How Doth the Little Alligator

This one's been a long time coming as well. Originally this was planned as the opening salvo of "Season Two", a direct follow-up to the end of The Zat: Seatown, where Mancuso and Zat's relationship is explored a little more and made expressly romantic. I'm not opposed to revisiting this one...

The Zat: Secret Files

In The Zat: Seatown, Burma has a throwaway line where he mentions that the last time he saw The Zat, Henderson had left him knee-deep in the snow. In my mind that line always referred to this incident. It was fun to translate that sketch at the end to an actual in-comic panel, even if the color isn't quite as heightened.

The Zat: Secret Files

This is another short story that's been cooking for a while. At some point I was struck by the image of Henderson in a high-tech suit, lost in the snow, and needed to expand on that. Unlike FOR HIRE, this one only existed in a single form since it's inception, which you'll see unfold here. I can't imagine this one as much mor...

The Zat: Secret Files

This particular short story went through a lot of iterations: Zat in Mercanik's role, Zat and Mercanik being set upon by twenty or so other villains led by 'Ranger and Argent, the train being in the Himalayas and derailing at Catfish's old lair, Cross was involved and fought a tiger in one version and there was a draft set in...

The Zat: Secret Files

Oh hey, finally got access to a scanner so I could edit these up into their final form.

The Zat: Secret Files

One of those great examples where, even though I've written out a script, the final pages are staggered a little differently, and the actual final dialogue I'll most likely come up with during the lettering process, based on somewhat on the lines presented here. Also a great example of a whole page just being removed to make ...

THE ZAT: Secret Files

Breaking ground on a new Zat issue, this one a trio of ten-page short stories featuring tales of The Zat I'd really like to tell, but can't seem to support as full 22-page issues.

Here's some pre-lettered pages for one of them, The Zat: For Hire. Dialogue very much subject to change, but I'll be serializing the rest of...

The Zat: For Hire

WIP painting for an upcoming Zat book, staging based loosely on a Richard Corben painting for Philip Jose Farmer's A Feast Unknown

Tarzat the Terrible

I have a grand vision for a full 22-pager featuring hand-drawn and photographed elements blended together in sort of a Harryhausen-esque collage style. For a long time I've kind of wrestled with what to make in that format, and while I haven't exactly landed on it still, I thought I'd at least experiment with the form and see...

PDSS: Justice League

Slid this into the back of the printed edition of SQUAD COMICS, I thought it would be fun to assemble a classic Justice League-type team using various Public Domain folks that equated Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Batman, Martian Manhunter, and Hawkman (not pictured in final drawing).

PDSS remaining thumbnails

Here's the rest of the thumbnails from Public Domain Squad, some of these I might have posted already, but much of the final page structures I laid out on the pages themselves, which resulted in a lot of panels being shuffled around, especially in the last five or six pages.

PDSS Page 23

And that's a wrap, hopefully physical copies will be on their way in a few weeks time.

PDSS Page 21/22

Ran off to New York for the week and left all my files at home, back and posting.

Much of page 21 is an homage to the staging of these two character's original showdown in Clue Comics #4

PDSS Page 20

Swisslakia is a fictional country in Central Europe from Clue Comics, ruled by a child-king with a thirst for adventure and an absolutely massive, living stone giant to back him up.

Also featuring the page-debut of the rest...

PDSS Page 19

From here on out, the script and panels in the thumbs are in a very different order, and don't really reflect the layouts of the final pages.

Also included in this post is the a page that was meant to take place just after Black Death hit the power switch to turn on Hitler's Rex, which I cut because it didn't really ad...