Wednesday 14 September 2016

Always a Rocker at heart...

So this week I grabbed my copy of Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman's new album Braver Than We Are. If you couldn't tell already from my work on Sioux Warrior, Steinman had a huge influence when I was growing up and I guess stoked a fire to put pictures and music together. Their albums felt like they were concepts for stage shows that never were and their covers felt like fragmented pieces of sequential art.


 I later found out that Steinman had indeed written and performed a stage show which many of Meat and Bonnie Tyler's hits were taken from entitled The Dream Engine, but there were still songs on Bat I and II that losely linked in with this world that weren't part of The Dream Engine, songs that echoed through the iconic art of Richard Corben and the masters that followed. Was the rider who didn't see the curb till it was way too late the same rider that burst out of Hell?  Did New York sink into Hell? Was this the vision of the entire city burning as spoken by Steinman on Dead Ringer? Was the angelic girl on Bat III's cover the one he'd  run right into Hell and back for? And more recently, through the cover for Braver Than We Are, we learn that the rider's motorcycle belongs to one of the 4 horsemen, how did the rider come to aquire it? This world was expanded on a little more in the promotional video for The Monster Is Loose but there are still so many unanswered questions.



For years, the music and the art enchanted me and pulled me into this world, into a story of possibities. It provoked and inspired me to be a storyteller. If you're out there Jim, I just want to say a massive thanks and ask if the story you had in your head was the same I had in mind? If you're out there Jim, I reckon it would make one hellova digital musical comic.

Yours faithful,

A Wasted Youth


UPDATE - My prayers have been answered, I've just heard that they're doing a Bat Out Of Hell Musical