BLOGGING ABOUT PETER MULLEN UNTIL WE HIT HIS TARGET!

Hello, welcome back to me whoring out my latest Kickstarter for a MONTH. We are half way through!

If you are interested in previous posts in this series here they are;

Crimes of an Analog Future

The Troll Kings Invisible Hands

Cults of the Cuts of the Oceanic Star

The Popinjays of Knarr

Bring me the head of the Mocking Man

The Giant became a Wolf

So far we have attained Jason Thompson and Jez Gordon as artists!

Our next mighty golden HOOP to SNATCH from the Gods is the talent of Peter Mullen.

I will be writing blogs about Peter Mullens illustrations EVERY FUCKING DAY until we hit his goal so please save me from that by backing the Kickstarter.

However you are probably familiar with Peters style from his wonderous work for DCC (I think) and various other 'old school' productions. You can check out a page of his classics here.

But if you go a page over you can see he also does very beautiful monochrome nocturnes, a subject dear to my heart.

The Lamps that were his Eyes

The man, his flesh was moonlight. He was up there, about a ladder high with his big eyes swinging, dripping starlight with no stars in the sky.

That man wouldn't come in the daytime, or when you could even see the sky, it was as if he feared the stars and the moon, and would race from them, his huge terrible shining head obliterating treeshadows in a bobbing gait.

Only the stars and the dawn made him afraid but, but for their light nothing stopped him coming. He pulled apart the darkness like someone stepping through a curtain, his moony headshine leaking through, nacreous and horrid.

Then he came, sometimes tentative, like a boy entering an adults room, other time striding blindly, as if only half way on a long journey, and him behind schedule.

He was not especially, ridiculously huge. His spine was bent and that unsupportable head was, lets say just below a second story window. If he straightened up (clearly agony for him) he could look through that window, or even over the roof.

What was he looking for?

Everything living froze in his sight and even witful creatures, even the wise and the strong, were drawn towards his distant gleam  - it took such strength of soul, sometimes even a nail in the shoe, some barbed wire round the thigh, to remind you never to go near it but to hide. 

Anyone who didn't know about the light might wake up dreaming, see the beams of his eyes drifting in the black trees like a ships lamps bobbing on a dark sea, the only lights in a dark world, and, wondering what they were, wander out there in wellingtons and dressing gown thinking they would only go to the edge of the field, craning their necks "I think I can see it. What is it?" But then, a little further, a hop over the fence, they walk into the woods, caught now in a beam of moonish white, now eaten by darkness, hopefully never seen again.

He melted them.

Probably didn't intend to. Possibly didn't even know what they were, or where he was, (if it was even a He, long eight-toed footprints in the mud), the number of people who got close enough to look and came back whole enough to speak was slim, but if you got close enough to him and he noticed you, (they said), he would look at you, with those burbling eyes like bubbling white soup and blunder over to you like a cartoon.

It was the eyes probably  - you started melting then. Not like, from acid, or like being burnt, it was stranger than that. You melted in one go, as if your bones and skin and stuff were all made of the same wax, maybe to him they were, and it didn't hurt, didn't even feel bad really, kinda nice almost, staring into those eyes.

You wouldn't feel the melting til he picked you up in both hands like a teddybear, saying things you couldn't hear, but like an itching, a whining in your head, like those small bones vibrating on their own.
The lumescent man, maybe he was asking something. Was he looking for something?

But no-one here could help him and when he looked at them, and picked them up, they came apart like things not of this world. If he kept at it too long they came apart, dribbled through his hands like a fruit cup. A mercy really as there was less to discover and clean up in the morning and while the parts didn't die straight away, they usually weren’t sentient by the time they were found, worse if he put you down or dropped or forgot you, those people, still not in pain, we found in daylight, a sight you wouldn't wish to witness.

Mainly they died too, thank god, all the body parts were there but all twisted and changed and usually that meant something would just give up working after a while, surface area or nerves or molecules or something.

The strangest thing about it was how sad he seemed, (that’s what they said), and they seemed like they were half asleep. Still thank god again for his blessings, we hit them with tranq till they slept and just waited out the death before we called it in. Otherwise they 'came to' like someone slowly waking up from sleepwalking, and realising they weren’t dreaming and that it was all really happening, and we had to explain to them again and again it wasn’t a dream and they were really here and were really like that, and no we had no idea about the moonshine man, or what he was or why.

After few of those you might put a bullet in them yourself I tell you.