Target Covers for Short Stories

These are some covers I did for Paul Burns. 

The first is a cover for a collection of his short stories - which had previously seen the light of day in a number of fan publications.

He also commissioned me to do faux Target book covers for each of his six stories. Despite the lack of visual references, I'm really pleased at how these came out. (Yes, that is a Z Victor car from Z Cars on the first cover!)

Thanks to Paul for allowing me to share these. 

If you have a short story you want a cover for, let me know. You can contact me on Twitter and we can work something out.

Doctor Who - Season Fourteen on Target

Now this for me is the apex of classic Doctor Who quality. The series' budget was certainly never spent better on a season where - in their own ways - each story is a classic. 

From the glorious rich renaissance atmosphere of 'The Masque of Mandragora' to the seedy grim London of 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang', the series never really hit the consistent quality that it had here - before or after. 

And the ratings reflected this with the series hardly out of the weekly top twenty. 

I could go on forever acknowledging the genuine scariness of 'The Robots of Death' and the shocking revelatory thrills of 'The Deadly Assassin' (especially THAT episode set in the matrix!!) But this is a blog that shows of my measly art. 

So here are six retro Target interpretations of the greatest season of 20th century Doctor Who!

Most of these designs are available printed on stuff like T shirts, clocks and shower curtains from RedBubble. The link is here>>>

Star Trek Discovery on VHS!

There was that huge curved ball that CBS/Paramount bowled late last year when they removed Star Trek Discovery from Netflix just days before it was due to premiere. The press release was a classic example of working to the rules of positivity when a more empathic approach was needed for an action that affected every fan who didn't live in North America. The bottom line was "No more new Star Trek until your country gets Paramount+ as a streaming service. 

To say it created a storm of protest is an understatement and no doubt, had this been the late 60s, a harsh letter writing campaign would no doubt result in the company's postal room being snowed under for several weeks.

But this isn't the 1960s. It's the space year 2022 and there are solutions to these sort of problems and these solutions can be sorted out immediately.

Star Trek Discovery was quickly transferred to the CBS owned zombie streaming service PlutoTV where it "airs" for free at 9pm every Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. It means everyone can see the episodes for free. Not at a time of their choosing admittedly but isn't that what TV was like in the 60s.

And there we are... back to the 60s again. Who knows, we might even get a revamp of the original 60s pilot episode to emphasise the comparison further?

This is all a roundabout way to present these two retro VHS covers I did. Back to the 90s though when we had to watch Star Trek The Next Generation et al on a two episode a month basis through the magic of VHS. It cost £9.99 a month too and took up yards of shelf space by the seventh season... Ah, the nostalgic memories... We never had it so good... did we???

If you like these anachronistic pieces of retro fluff, then you can show you appreciation of the artist by slipping him a coffee via his Ko-fi page. The link is here.

Bionic™ Spin-off Annuals

I was asked by John who runs the @Bionic_Tweets Twitter account. He'd seen my work and wanted me to produce some annuals featuring popular characters from the TV shows 'The Six Million Dollar Man' and 'The Bionic Woman' for the Christmas period. We settled on four titles featuring 'Oscar Goldman' (the non-bionic boss of lead characters Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers), 'Bigfoot' (a space android disguised as the legendary US crypto-beast Sasquatch), the 'Fembots' (android doppelgangers used to infiltrate whatever the script writers deemed interesting that week... and inspiration for the villains of the same name in the Austin Powers movies) and, last but by no means least, Max the Bionic Dog (the fence and shark jumping German Shepherd looked after by Jaime Sommers). 

The covers used some lovely hi-res photographs from the series and I was able to create some designs that had a colourful feel for the period.

The Max the Bionic Dog annual is based on the cover of the first Six Million Dollar Man annual. And yes, those are all genuine images of Max and not stock photos of any old German Shepherd. Note the loose wiring on his neck!.

The Oscar annual cover features the character's exploding briefcase - unseen in the series but a vital accessory for the Oscar Goldman action figure. 

I put Bigfoot and the Fembots together because I liked the sound of the title. It had a 60s/70s pop group vibe to it. Very pleased with the look of this one - particularly the colours.

John has very kindly let me put these on the blog. You can visit his Twitter feed for all your bionic needs at @Bionic_Tweets . 

Doctor Who Season Thirteen on Target

Continuing with the retro Target books, here's season 13. 

It was during this season that I queued up outside Preedy's newsagents in Derby's Eagle Centre in order to have a fully costumed Tom Baker sign my copy of 'Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion' - an odd choice since it was a Jon Pertwee adventure but it was at the time, the only Target book I didn't own.

 From that day until today, I had a complete set of first edition Target books (except for 'The Two Doctors' which is a "Second Edition" due to a f*** up at W H Allen.)

These covers are available as design on RedBubble. 

Check them out via this link.