By Jonathan Williams
For monster artist Eric Pigors, every day is Halloween. Well, at least it should be considering the macabre and maniacal masks, T-shirts, prints and books that come from his Toxictoons collection. While he has worked on such family-friendly Disney hits as The Lion King and The Princess and the Frog, cartoonishly delightful looks at death and dismemberment have always been his forte. But when he suffered a heart attack just before the release of his latest book, Deaths Casket: Art of Unkle Pigors, Pigors realized that he may have been channeling some subconscious concerns about his own health in some of his latest works.
“For the last year I’ve kind of had a weird feeling like, ‘Ugh. I don’t feel like I’m going to be around much longer,'” says Pigors. “A lot of the book is death-themed with cemeteries, mortuaries and stuff like that. So maybe subconsciously it was seeping out of me. I don’t know, maybe I’m just reading too much into what I’m drawing. If I took my book to my shrink I’m sure she’d have a field day.”
Including new material as well as work he has done for Netherworld Haunted House and bands such as the 69 Eyes, the Laughing Dead, Psycho Charger, the Ghastly Ones and Bill Moseley‘s Spider Mountain, the new book is exactly what fans of Pigors’ Toxictoons have come to love.
“It’s pretty much like the art I’ve been doing since the last book came out,” he admits. “It’s 100 pages of new art, but a lot of it’s similar to that book. It has band art in it, stuff I did for Netherworld, Halloween and all the other stuff I usually draw like Frankenstein, vampires, skulls and stuff like that.”
Another new creation for Pigors is the Monsterpieces iPhone app he created with fellow Disney animator Eric Daniels, which features Pigors’ artwork as well as music by Los Straitjackets.
“I worked with his wife Margie Daniels on The Princess and Frog and a hand-drawn 3D featurette for the DVD release of Kung Fu Panda 2,” says Pigors. “He wanted to do an app with an artist and liked what I was doing.”
Though he is recovering well from his ailment, he has still had to lay low this Halloween season, skipping his annual trip to Netherworld and other seasonal festivities. But he says he is still going to decorate his mom’s garage for trick-or-treaters, another of his Halloween traditions. You can also find Pigors and his Toxictoons creations at the Bats Day Holiday Black Market in Anaheim, Calif. on Nov. 6.
For more information, go to www.toxictoons.com.