Buffy and The Scoobies

*******UPDATE*******
Coming Monday, February 13th to Teefury for 24 hours only!!

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2011 has been an excellent year. I was able to participate in some excellent Gallery shows, most notably "Crazy 4 Cult" at Gallery 1988 where I debuted my "Sing Along with Dr. Horrible" album. I also got to participate in a great charity event for Equality Now where I got to meet Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day.

I worked with Teefury to raise money for Maurissa Tancharoen Whedon and her Walk for Lupus Campaign, and in return I got some AWESOME stuff in the mail from some pretty awesome people:


As the great 2011 draws to a close, as does my series of Whedon inspired albums with my latest piece:


I created this artwork for one of the most important people in the world to me. My new Fiancé Kristin. She is amazing and there are so many reasons why I love her. One of which is that she was wearing a batman t-shirt when I proposed to her. She also happens to be a HUGE Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. When she came into my life, she brought Buffy along with her. I had seen and loved Firefly, Dollhouse, and Dr. Horrible, but I had yet to experience Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well now I am happy to report that I get it... Buffy is pretty awesome. It may have taken a while, but by the end of 2011 I will have finished all 7 seasons of Buffy.

I know that Kristin isn't the only fan of Buffy, and so I wanted to share this with you. Yes YOU! If you're reading this right now... YOU are awesome. YOU are also very good looking and YOU smell nice.

Hellmouth Records has just issued this press release:
"Fresh out of Sunnydale, here comes Buffy and the Scoobies with their debut album "Chosen"! Choose your weapon and get your blood boiling with heart pounding songs such as "The Big Bad", "Out For A Walk, Bitch", and "Hush". Buffy and the Scoobies take aim at your heart and will have you begging for more. Fortune favors the brave when you are Chosen."


Here's a look at the track listing:


This is what the record label looks like:


Prints of the artwork are available to purchase exclusively through my Etsy store located at joebot.etsy.com
Buffy and the Scoobies front: HERE
Buffy and the Scoobies front and back set: HERE
If you're extra good this year, this design may appear in t-shirt form very very soon.

I always appreciate hearing from fans of my work, so feel free to leave a comment below with your thoughts! And remember what your mother should have told you, if you have nothing nice to say, write it on the internet.

Here's to 2012, let's all hope the Mayans are wrong!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!http://www.teefury.com/

The Legends of Hyrule - Gallery 1988

**UPDATE**
On Saturday, November 19th, this design will be available exclusively at Shirtpunch.com for 24 hours only, then it's gone forever. The shirt will cost $10 (or about 100 Rupee's depending on the Hyrulian exchange rate). So be sure to mark your calendars and tell your friends!

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I grew up playing video games. At the tender age of 5 years old my family got a Nintendo Entertainment System and I got REALLY into it. Mario was great, but then about a year later, The Legend of Zelda came out. I must have sunk months... maybe years of my childhood into roaming around Hyrule, I really should have been granted dual citizenship. From then on, I was a gamer for life.

So when Gallery 1988 asked me to participate in their upcoming Video Game Show, I was beyond honored. Zelda is celebrating it's 25th anniversary this year, so it only seemed appropriate to create a piece celebrating one of my favorite game series. Combining three of my favorite things: Music, Video Games, and Illustration, I followed along my theme of creating retro children's albums for Firefly and Dr. Horrible I decided to set my sights on The Legend of Zelda.

Link and Zelda have taken a break from their adventures. The Princess is tired of constantly being kidnapped by Ganon and Link needed to relax and fill up his heart containers. During some downtime, the two came together and decided to put pen to paper and out of that came The Legends of Hyrule's new album "Songs of Time":



Here's the back of the album and it's track listing:



Click the links below to find out more about the meaning behind the song titles!

Side A:
Heroes of Time
It's Dangerous To Go Alone
Excuse Me, Princess
A Secret To Everybody
The Wind, It Is Blowing

Side B:
Come On!
Grumble Grumble
I Am Error
You Got A Piece Of Heart
Hey, Listen

In addition to prints, I always make one physical album that is mounted and framed. Since all of the Zelda games have shipped on gold cartridges I thought it would be fitting that the album would be pressed on gold records:



Here's the label printed on the record:



This framed album will be available exclusively at Gallery 1988 at the show opening: Purchase it HERE!



The album's Front and back prints will be available exclusively through my etsy store. To purchase high-quality prints, all you have to do is click HERE!.
Signed prints of the album front will be available exclusively at the gallery and online through Gallery 1988's Website.

If you love video games, or at one point in your life you did, then you will not want to miss this show. With about 100 featured artists, the Old School Video Game Art Show is likely to have something that interests everyone who ever picked up a controller at one point in there life.

The Old School Video Game Art Show
Friday Sept. 16th - October 8th
Gallery 1988
214 Pier Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90405
http://www.gallery1988.com
http://www.joebot.etsy.com

Gallery 1988 - Garbage Pail Kids Show!

Let's travel back in time to 1985. The world was a different place back then...

-"We Are the World" was the #1 song in the country.
-New Coke is released and immediately despised by everyone (everyone but Bill Cosby)
-"Back to the Future" opens in theaters around the country and the DeLorean becomes the ultimate time machine.
-Windows 1.0 is released by Microsoft, Steve Ballmer suffers from insanity... sorry Nebraska.
-Nintendo releases the NES packed in with Super Mario Bros. to America (my life is changed forever).
-Topps produces a series of trading cards called "Garbage Pail Kids". Parents everywhere cringe in disgust.


Garbage Pail Kids were basically cards that made fun of Cabbage Patch Kids with gross names which most of the time translated to real life teasing of kids that were unfortunate enough to share a name with an existing card such as "Scotty" or "Amy"

I was safe... It's hard to rhyme Joey with anything that's too embarrassing. Slowy and Doughy aren't all that bad... Anyway, coming up in the first week of September, Gallery 1988 is holding a Garbage Pail Kids show! They asked artists to re-imagine their favorite Garbage Pail Kids card in their own style.

I was a huge fan of the 1960's card series "Mars Attacks" which was later turned into a Tim Burton film.



Luckily, there was a Garbage Pail Kids card "Alien Ian" that had been done in this style, and so I was more than happy to work on this. Here's my piece for the show:


The show opens Friday September 2nd at Gallery 1988 on Melrose in Los Angeles and runs through October 1st. I will have prints available to purchase both at the Gallery and through their online store.


Come on out for the opening! It's sure to be disgusting and entertaining!

The Garbage Pail Kids Show
Sept. 2nd, 2011
7020 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
http://www.gallery1988.com

** UPDATE **
Some good reviews of the show! Hayley Williams of Paramore makes an appearance :)
http://thehundreds.com/blog/2011/09/03/grossed-out/
http://dailydujour.com/2011/09/02/seen-garbage-pail-kids-gallery-1988/

Our Lady of Sunnydale Shirt!

!!!!!!! This shirt is now available on my Redbubble store !!!!!!!

Attention all Buffy fans! Yes... that means YOU. I know this is late notice, i'm very sorry, but I've been busy! Comic-Con isn't just going to see itself. I have a new t-shirt going up for sale on Teefury starting at Midnight (Eastern) tonight and 9:00pm (for all of us west coasters). On Tuesday July 26th, you can buy "Our Lady of Sunnydale" from Teefury.com for the very low price of just $10. I spent that on nacho sauce this past week at Comic-Con, so $10 for a t-shirt is a pretty good deal. It's only available for 24 hours so go go go!



(Edit) It seems that the image that Teefury has displayed is burning peoples retinas resulting in hate-filled anger that would make Satan himself proud. These above images more reflect the actual design and the shirt.

Crazy 4 Cult 5: President Camacho

It is a fact that as a society, we are becoming dumber. Mike Judge, creator of the brilliant "Office Space", realized this several years ago when in 2006 he wrote and directed one of the best documentaries on the future. Idiocracy is the story about an average man that in 2005 is frozen as part of a military experiment. He is forgotten about and awakened 500 years in the future where he has now become the smartest man alive due to the dumbing down of the rest of the world. The movie only showed in a few theaters around the country and was was all but ignored by 20th Century Fox's marketing department, as demonstrated by this terrible trailer:



The movie was dumped onto DVD which is exactly where I found it. This movie is definitely not for everyone. My girlfriend Kristin hated it because "of all the trash and stupid people everywhere". How can you not love a movie that contains this scene:



My favorite character from the film is easily President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho A.K.A. President Camacho, a former porn star and professional wrestler portrayed by the always excellent Terry Crews. For this years Gallery 1988 show "Crazy 4 Cult 5" I submitted two pieces. The first one is a Dr. Horrible piece and the other is this tribute to the future President of The United States of America: President Camacho



Signed prints will be available at the show and on Gallery 1988's website!



Crazy 4 Cult 5: I'm Too Old For This Sh*t!!!
July 8th, 2011
7020 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
http://www.gallery1988.com

Crazy 4 Cult 5: I'm Too Old For This Sh*t!!!!

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***UPDATE*** Because the internet is awesome, this Dr. Horrible design is now officially licensed merchandise! You can buy it for yourself and all of your loved ones over at Quantum Mechanix by clicking HERE!

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It's like Christmas in July! Gallery 1988 is having their 5th annual "Crazy 4 Cult" show in Hollywood on July 8th, 2011! I am more than honored to be a part of this show for the 2nd time.


Crazy 4 Cult has become a summer tradition in Hollywood. Every year a group of around 100 artists come together to celebrate our love of cult movies. There are always so many to choose from and this year I had a hard time deciding which movie to choose. I was torn between 2 different films. Well, technically, one was an internet film, but it has quite a cult following nonetheless.

Last year I had chosen a film that I felt was very under-represented but loved by a very vocal and awesome group of fans that call themselves Browncoats. While I was creating "River Tam and the Fireflies" for last years show, I knew I had made something special... but I had no idea it would take off like it did. The internet was very kind to me and that artwork took me on a strange adventure over the course of the year.

I made some new friends:



I got a lot of press coverage on some of my favorite websites. I sold a few T-Shirts, and received quite a few justified complaints about a missing Shepard.

Last week I was asked to participate in an awesome event called "Can't Stop The Serenity" here in Los Angeles. More on the event can be found by clicking HERE. I had donated some artwork to be auctioned off for a charity called Equality Now. I made a few more friends at the event:


I was able to show Joss, Nathan, and Felicia the new artwork I had created for this years Crazy 4 Cult show. I was a little nervous showing them but it seems like they enjoyed it!


They each requested some of the artwork, so i'm currently putting together some special gifts for them. This was an amazing opportunity and I thank Gallery 1988 for allowing me to be a part of their show. For this years show, i'll be contributing two pieces to the Crazy 4 Cult show. I'll be writing another blog about the 2nd piece, but for now, here is my artwork submission for "Crazy 4 Cult 5: I'm Too Old For This Sh*t!!!"



I consider this to be a companion piece to the "River Tam and the Fireflies". If you're not familiar with Dr. Horrible, then you owe it to yourself to pick-up this movie. It's a 45 minute musical set in 3 acts. It was self-funded and produced during the writers strike a few years back. The writing is fantastic, as usual, but the music is the real star of the show. I'm a big fan of musicals, and this short film doesn't disappoint. A framed album will be available at the gallery. Unfortunately the soundtrack wasn't released on Vinyl, so i've included another record in it's place.


Here's the back of the album:


And the framed album that will be available at the show:


The album's Front and back prints will be available exclusively through my etsy store. To purchase high-quality water color prints, all you have to do is click HERE!. Signed prints of the album front will be available exclusively at the gallery and online through Gallery 1988's Website.

If you love film and you love artwork, you won't want to miss what is becoming THE gallery event of the year in Los Angeles. Come on down to Melrose, see some awesome artwork from some amazingly talented people, and then go across the street to Pink's Hot Dogs and get one of the best tasting dogs of your life!

Crazy 4 Cult 5: I'm Too Old For This Sh*t!!!
July 8th, 2011
7020 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
http://gallery1988.com

Crazy 4 Cult Book Signing!

It's that time of year again when Gallery 1988 puts on their annual "Crazy 4 Cult" show, more on that soon. This year they have decided to put a book together with a lot of artwork from all previous "Crazy 4 Cult" shows and in honor of that, they're holding a book release/signing party!


Come on down to Gallery 1988 for what's sure to be a fun time. My "River Tam and the Fireflies" artwork from last years show is featured in this book along with work from some amazing artists including Shepard Fairey and Scott Campbell.

As for the book, I haven't seen it yet, but the reviews are starting to roll in and it sounds like an awesome collection that film fans will surely want to pick up. The first review can be found by clicking here.

Gallery 1988 celebrates 10 years of "Wet Hot American Summer"

I loved the Mtv show "The State" when I was a teenager. The show lasted 3 seasons with a total of 26 hilarious episodes, with great characters like Louie who wanted to dip his balls in everything, Doug, who was outta heerrrreeee, old fashioned guy, and this gem:

Well, 10 years ago, these guys decided to make a movie. Wet Hot American Summer is a comedy that is sitting at a cool 30% freshness rating on Rottentomatoes.com. I wasn't even aware of the movie until Gallery 1988 asked if I was interested in being part of the gallery show celebrating it's 10 year status as a cult classic. Once I googled it and found out it was the guys from The State I was in.

Having never been to camp (aside from a horrific weeklong trip to "outdoor school" in 5th grade), It was hard for me to relate to a movie about camp life in the 1980's. What wasn't hard to relate to were some pretty funny characters, in particular Keith Stat from Millburn, New Jersey who really only had this little bit part in the film:

So for the show I decided to illustrate my tribute to camp nerds everywhere who loved D&D and a good ol' fashioned home-made cape.



So if you have $240 worth of pudding, be sure to head down to Gallery 1988's Venice Gallery.

Defenders and Destroyers of the Universe Now in T-Shirt Form!

Earlier this year I submitted my "Appetite For Eternia" design to teefury.com and I was blown away by the success of the sales! Teefury.com is awesome! They also recently printed my "River Tam and the Fireflies" design. I love making t-shirts, so I submitted some designs to a few other shirt sites.

Nowherebad.com is a brand new t-shirt site similar to Teefury and Ript. I will be featured as their third artist, which is pretty awesome. Shirts here are $15 with free shipping, and are available for 3 days as opposed to the usual 24 hours of some of the other shirt sites. They have chosen my VolTRON design which is a loving tribute to two awesome 80's icons of Tron and Voltron. The shirt will be on sale Monday through Wednesday, May 16th - 18th for $15. This will be the only place to get this shirt, so I hope everyone that wants one will find out about the sale!



Also going up next week is my loving tribute to Cylons with "By Your Command". I had to alter the design a bit from the original but hopefully BSG fans will still love the design. This shirt will be available for 24 hours only at Riptapparel.com for a low fee of $10! This shirt will be available Tuesday, May 17th only and then gone forever (or possibly brought back to life on Ebay).



A special thank you to both Nowherebad.com and Riptapparel.com for featuring my artwork, and thanks to anyone that orders a shirt or two!

Leftovers from Springfield

Back in 2006 I worked as a Concept Artist on "The Simpsons Game" for Electronic Arts. I've recently been backing up some files when I came across a few images that I had created for the game. I'm not sure if these even made it into the game. I know for sure that "The Shims" was cut because, as I learned when I moved to The Sims team at EA, they weren't very pleased with the image and didn't give it the go-ahead.

One of my producers on the project had tasked me with creating some images that would appear either at the Game Stop store in Springfield or somewhere in the game later. So I decided to take some of my favorite games as well as some beloved EA Franchises, and "simpsonize" them. Here are a few!

I believe this one was a dual effort of mine and another artist. I basically took his rough sketch and cleaned it up.


I'm a huge Half-Life fan, so I would take any chance to squeeze in a reference to that series. Flavin!


This was my attempt to remind the fine folks at EA that they used to have an awesome football series that didn't include the word "Madden" followed by a number. I'm not a sports guy at all... I avoid sports like the plague, but I LOVED "Mutant League Football" on the Genesis. I would happily take an XBLA reboot of Mutant League Football.


This was an interesting one. I had moved onto Dead Space after wrapping up work on the Simpsons, but the game was still in development for about another year. I had some downtime on Dead Space, and I was lent out to The Simpsons team for about a week. I drew this up for the studio as an homage to what I knew was going to be a great classic game. The problem was that the Simpsons Game was going to be released before Dead Space was even announced. I'm not sure if it made it into the game or not, but they did turn this into a poster that was hung up around the studio for a while.

The Frakkin Toasters

In honor of my shirt sale at Teefury , I have created another image in a similar style to the River Tam and the Fireflies piece. This time however I set my sights on one of my other favorite Sci-fi series in recent years, Battlestar Galactica.

I had so much fun trying to work Battlestar into an album cover, but there were so many characters... and they're ALL awesome!



I wasn't sure which direction to take it at first, so I started with a name. I had thought of a few that weren't quite working for me, and when I wrote down "The Frakkin Toasters" I knew I'd found my direction.

Of course it's a sorta punk-new wave-metal band. I imagined they would sound something like "The Network" but instead of Billie Joe's vocals (you're not fooling anyone Green Day) Caprica 6 would handle lead singer duties. And as much as I loved the Centurions from the rebooted BSG, I still feel the Original Cylons are much more iconic.



Once I had the band name and the album cover sketched out, I needed a catchy title. Since it was a cylon themed image, it was pretty clear what the album should be:


Here is the album cover:


I love doing all of the design work, but I also really enjoy coming up with songs that would be on an album such as this. It wasn't until I started doing some research for song titles did I find out that Caprica 6 has a phrase that she repeats multiple times throughout the series. When she meets a human for the first time, she asked them, "Are you alive?" which in both deep and awesome, so that's definitely the song to open the record with. I also learned that the term "CYLON" was an acronym created for the re-booted series, and if there's one thing I love, it's acronyms! The 5th song on the album is called "The Final 5" for pretty obvious reasons. As for the rest, they're pretty straight forward. Okay... maybe not, "End of line" is awesome because I look at is like a Tron reference, but it's also often spoken by the Hybrids in the weird Cylon bathtub. I thought about including the song title "All Along the Watchtower" but that song really pulled me out of the fictional world on the show, so I decided against it.



I'm hoping that Teefury will turn the design into a shirt. I've submitted it, but have yet to hear back from them, so if you happen to come across this site, feel free to visit http://www.teefury.com and send them a friendly message of what you'd like to see. Also, as always, prints are available on my Etsy store, just click here :)

Live long and prosper... oh wait, wrong show.
-Joey

Happy Valentron's Day!

For that special someone in your life who loves Tron almost as much as you do...

Save Ferris! The Nintendo Game That Never Was

Last year I had great success with Gallery 1988's Crazy 4 Cult show in Los Angeles. They were kind enough to invite me to contribute work to multiple shows this year, the first being "The Road To Shermer: A Tribute To John Hughes". I'm a little bit different then most kids of the 80's, as I really am not a big John Hughes fan. I have seen his movies, and some of them I really like, but i've never been a huge fan of Sixteen Candles, or The Breakfast Club. But there's a reason for that, and that reason is video games.

I was born in 1980. When I was 5 years old, a brand new shiny Nintendo Entertainment System came into my life one Christmas morning, and me in all of my 5 years of life knew that things would never be the same. We had an Apple II as well as an Intellivision, and they were great, but something about the squatty little Italian plumber and the simple 2 button controller really spoke to my 5 year old sensibilities. Also, it came with a robot that I could play with when my brother wasn't around.

So movies of the 80's came and went, and I saw and loved a few here and there, but I was a video game fiend. It came time to create a piece of artwork for the John Hughes tribute and I had a bit of a hard time coming up with a concept. I started to think about what it was that his movies main draw was, and I thought about the great characters he created that became cultural icons. I quickly drew a comparison to the old Lucas Arts adventure games. Tim Schafer was my John Hughes. Games like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Sam & Max had characters developed as deeply as any in a film like Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club. But those games came out in the 90's. John Hughes movies exemplified the 80's, and so I would need a more 80's theme to the art piece.

There were some awful Licensed games released for the NES.
Exhibit A:


The thing I love about those old NES boxes was that the artwork was really representative of the gameplay.



Then somewhere down the line someone in marketing decided it would be cool to imply amazing graphics with the box art because you should always judge a book by it's cover:



For a tribute to John Hughes, I thought I'd like to make a game based off of my favorite of John Hughes movies, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". It would have to be an action game set in chicago. It would also need Cameron's dad's Ferrari. Inspired by the Super Mario Bros. box art, my goal was to create a fitting tribute to both John Hughes and Nintendo.



and the finished image:



But as I learned with my "River Tam and the Fireflies" piece, if you build it, they will come. It's cool to have artwork, but it's cooler to create a collectible, one-of-a-kind item. So I made the box:



And you're gonna need a game cartridge and instruction booklet:




(The cartridge doesn't contain an actual Save Ferris game, it was however at one point my copy of "Back to the Future Part II")

All of this and more can be yours if you come down to Gallery 1988's new location in Venice, CA on Friday February 11th. There are 50 artists participating in the show and Gallery 1988 always puts on a fun gallery opening.



Prints will also be available both at the gallery and online in my Etsy store.

P.S. Gallery 1988, how about a "Tribute to Tim Schafer" themed show?