Count Pugsly's Promo...

Count Pugsly, deliberately spelled without an E, was the name of a lovable vampire/mascot who spent 13 lucky years lurking in the halls of Seattle's old Jones' Fantastic Museum (a folksy version of the Robert Ripley Odditoriums that began popping up in the early 1930s). The character was portrayed by a young man named William Harry Pugmire, who, at the time, was tall, thin, but probably awkward, and definitely enthusiastic about horror movies. He was also Jewish on his mother's side but Mormon on his father's, and when young William reached adulthood, he was strongly encouraged to go on a two-year mission to spread the Mormon faith, during which his interest in horror movies was deemed radically inappropriate. So he began reading horror literature, eventually discovering the works of H. P. Lovecraft and ultimately becoming an accomplished Lovecraftian author who wrote under the name W. H. Pugmire, AKA, Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire.

I met Wilum in 2016, when I interviewed him for an article that was published in The Monarch Review. And when that interview concluded, he was excited to invite me to watch an episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller. But I politely declined, in part because I had an article to write and in rest because I worried that the combination of Wilum's radically alternative lifestyle and personality was just too much for me to handle. It was an unfortunate decision that to this day remains one of my greatest regrets. Because years later, when I finally mustered the courage to seek Wilum’s friendship, I was saddened to discover that he’d passed.

More years later, when my own interest in writing shifted focus from journalism to storytelling, I began thinking of Wilum posthumously as the friend that I never got to know. And since he'd been kind enough to contribute to that posthumous friendship by leaving behind a wealth of original stories for me to read, it seemed only appropriate for me to return the favor by writing something original for him...

The concept was that it should be a kind of advertisement, i.e., the commercial interruption of a late-late horror movie (Curse Of The Crimson Alter), showing off a few of the museum's exhibits and attractions. And you can read the resulting minicomic online for free by following this link. But this blog entry is about the process that led to its completion, something I thought it'd be helpful to chronicle since, having spent several years focused on writing nothing other than my first novel, I admit to having been terrified when it finally came time to write anything else.

In fact, it wasn't until reading Jessica Amanda Salmonson's endearing introduction in Wlium's collection of shorts, Bohemians of Sesqua Valley, that I finally found inspiration in considering young William's sense of humor. Because that's what I saw in the Count: a character whose motives were rooted in entertainment.

Wilum had some informative things to say about the character in his blog, but I found the videos on his YouTube channel to be much more entertaining. So, since sifting through his many videos can be time-consuming, here's a more convenient Count Pugsly playlist...

2009 (11.25.01) Jones' Fantastic Museum (Memories)

2009 (11.25.02) Mr. Wilum Introduces Count Pugsly

2009 (11.25.03) More Memories Of Jones' Fantastic Museum

2010 (01.19.01) Re: The Man From Mars Machine

2010 (01.19.02) Count Pugsly Remembers The Jones' Fantastic Museum

2014 (01.08) Pugsly's Theme

But even these were just a starting point because, although Wilum described his memories with passion, those memories focused on his own character, and my task as an artist was to tell a story that would include other characters from the museum. So, after taking a good-long look at the museum's Wikipedia page, I took an equally-long look at a website with a really weird URL: https://www.lhs78.org/jones_fantastic_museum.php, that was filled with pictures of the museum's original exhibits...

But even this wasn't enough, because I wanted to do more than recreate something from a picture or a memory. I wanted to produce an original work, set in a place and time that were as far removed from my life in the 21st century as a fantasy is from reality. So I started thinking about young William's fantasies in the 1960s and 70s, the horror movies and TV series that might've inspired them, and then I came up with a period-appropriate playlist that spanned roughly six hours a day for six days...

I know my handwriting's impossible to read, so here's the (abridged) legible version: Each day began with the 1973 Hanna-Barbera version of The Addams Family...

I'm sure it's difficult to tell from the above picture, but that's a young Jodie Foster as the voice of Pugsley (deliberately spelled with an E). The Addams were followed by Sid and Marty Krofft's Lidsville, starring Charles Nelson Reilly as the green-faced Horatio J. Hoodoo, who, in retrospect, bore a slight resemblance to my final version of the Count...

And I always like to include something educational on my TV playlists, so the kids' programming was followed by Leonard Nimoy, who, in retrospect, bore a slight resemblance to Leonard Nimoy, hosting the 1970s cult classic, In Search Of, which was dedicated to exploring the lore behind general or specific topics like Voodoo, Bigfoot, or Dracula...

Then I watched the first of two movies for the day. And the first was always something that fell into the comedy or schlock subsets of the horror/fantasy genre. My favorite among these were the first and second Dr. Phibes films, but, with the exception of movies and TV series that were filmed in black and white, I noticed something interesting that seemed common to all of the period-appropriate media when I watched Jack The Giant Killer. Here's the trailer...

It's not easy to see in this, because this is an unfortunately low-quality video, but the thing I noticed was crystal clear when I watched Agnes Moorehead playing Endora in Bewitched...

The Munsters (starring Butch Patrick, who also starred in Lidsville), the first season of Dark Shadows, and Boris Karloff's Thriller were all filmed in black and white, but the thing I noticed jumped off the screen and grabbed me by the brain when I watched certain gothic-horror movies like the 1958 Hammer version of Dracula, and especially so when I watched Boris Karloff in Black Sabbath...

After the late-night movies, I'd watch the original Twilight Zone, which was also in black and white, but my crazy-looking notes on the whole experience were in full color...

And when I sobered up, the only thing I could do to make sense of those notes was to select a few key lines of what seemed like dialogue, write those lines on tiny scraps of paper, and arrange/rearrange them on my coffee table until I had something that seemed like the start of a conversation...

And once that ball got rolling, I was finally able to doodle up something that looked like a storyboard...

But again, after spending years focused on nothing but my novel and drawing almost nothing but doodles on tiny scraps of paper, I wondered whether I'd forgotten how to draw properly. So I drew up another playlist, filled with more of Wilum's YouTube videos, more period-appropriate movies, a few of my own favorite cartoons for aesthetic inspiration, and a wonderful series of how-to-draw videos by BeeJay DeLong...

BeeJay started me off with faces. And as soon as you can draw a face, you can draw anything. So my next step was to start drawing some of the characters I'd seen online, and the first of those was Link, the man or monkey, seen below on the far left of the display case...

And below in my final set of inked drawings...

Then I drew Olaf, the Viking giant...

Then I drew the "abdominal" snow woman...

Then I drew the three-breasted, four-legged woman...

And the magnificent marble machine, and the snake-oil machine, and the genuine sample of cool air from the South Pole (and the petrified spaceman). Then I watched a movie called Horrors Of Spider Island...

Which was unfortunately filmed in black and white. And I admit that when I first started playing around with a color scheme for the collaged illustrations, my first experiments were mostly black and white...

Until I reexamined my crazy-looking notes and considered the something interesting that seemed common to all of the (color) period-appropriate media I'd been watching, i.e., that although the 21st century convention in horror might be to make things look scary via heavy use of the color black, people in the 1960s and 70s used color differently. And that bright, if not intensely-vivid colors could be combined in weird ways to convey a sense of the otherworldly. So after careful consideration and much experimentation, I recolored my background using mostly pink and recolored the foreground characters and objects to stand out against the mostly-pink background...

And if you read Wilum's work, you'll find similarly unusual references to color. The image below is a perfect example, being an illustration by Matthew Jaffe for Some Unknown Gulf Of Night...

Did you notice the mauve mist and the gold and pink sky in the background? Check out the image below, done by the aforementioned artist as a cover for the aforementioned book...

The girl in yellow is Marceline Dubois, one of Wilum's original creations. I tried illustrating her for my article in The Monarch Review, but made the mistake of recoloring of her dress to stand out against the mostly-yellow background...

In retrospect, I think I could've made her yellow dress stand out against her red hair. But I was always pressed for time at The Monarch, and, since I'm neither a full-time artist nor writer, I find myself similarly pressed in all my creative endeavors. So if you've read the aforementioned minicomic, I'm sure you'll notice all my shortcuts and possibly even a few errors. You can follow this link to see some of the project's unpolished process work on my DeviantArt page, and in the meantime, please just note that my intention was never to offend but only to celebrate the early life and creative origin of someone I admire.