A few years ago I met a wicked dude named Josh. Josh and I have become great friends in those few years. Towards the end of grade 12 in high school Josh told me he wanted me to do some art for some theoretical bands he wanted to make. One was to be called Dangerous Rape which turned into an entirely different project, void of Sweetmanian art. The other was something called Tiger Assault Pageant. He wanted me to draw tigers wearing dresses, with guns. I thought that sounded hilarious and spent a few hours making what I found to be some quality drawings for the project. Josh loved them and told me that I should become part of the project fully. TAP started as a band that was going to be entirely "progressive". With Josh as a huge Steve Vai fan and us both having an appreciation for The Mars Volta, we started talking about poking fun at progressive music by "just making a lot of sounds with a lot of effects". The project fizzled out after we moved to different cities.
Halfway through last year Josh messaged me to ask me if I would just do some art for TAP, of Tigers with guitars and lasers and stuff. Some of them fighting robots. The project gained new life and I drew the picture featured in one of my first posts on May Contain Dragons. Josh suggested that we make a comic that people listening to the album could read as they listened, with lyrics in the songs reflected in the dialogue of the comic. So we started. No longer so interested in aping prog rock, we were now interested in just making something that sounded good, looked cool and most importantly... now aped a lot from the 80s cult classic Heavy Metal. So we developed a plot and how the songs would progress. We decided that each song and chapter should be done in a slightly different art style and wildly different musical style. These were pretty much based on whatever music me and Josh like or want to make fun of so the range is pretty wide. We later recruited our friends Ryan Peters and Andrew Jarvis to help us out on the musical side. So Tiger Assault, after some prep work, came to life as a politically incorrect, and frankly bizarre comic/album.
Tiger Assault Pageant follows the events of a Tiger Uprising on the planet Aries. Above the planet's surface live Cyborgs who are oppressive and evil rulers who abduct tigers and perform genetic experiments on them. One day they knock on the wrong door. This starts a tiger rebel group known as the Pageant to start a rebellion (mostly based on the fact that the Cyborgs destroyed all the fo'ties [40oz bottles of malt liquor]). The Tigers go on an epic adventure that takes them into space, finds them allied with dragons, a rhino and some malfunctioning robots.
Josh and I are both big fans of doing, frankly obnoxious, freestyling. Themes in our freestyling have really come out into the themes of TAP. Things like Starcraft, 40s, Pizza and Dr. Pepper are frequent themes in out raps and you'll see those themes come back a lot in the actual album.
After that long explanation I hope you get a little more why I continue into these drawings of anthropomorphic tigers and these... cyborgs. Here are the latest frames I've done. I'm almost at a part of the comic that will actually be interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment