Friday, July 01, 2005

The Paleo-Path (Part 11): Pete Von Sholly



Pete Von Sholly has been a movie storyboard artist for over twenty years and worked on well over one hundred feature films, notably THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, MARS ATTACKS, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, THE MASK, DARKMAN and THE GREEN MILE. He has storyboarded Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Pinhead and Pumpkinhead... but the most fun he ever had working on a movie was on his own PREHYSTERIA series and DISNEY'S DINOSAUR because he actually got paid to draw dinosaurs all day... something he'd been doing for free most of his life ever since early exposure to KING KONG, FANTASIA, the legendary WORLD WE LIVE IN books, TUROK SON OF STONE and dinosaurs wherever else he could find them. He has co-created three albums of dinosaur music with fellow musician and paleographer supreme, Don Glut, (DINOSAURS THE ENCYCLOPEDIA and its many invaluable supplements) self published a children's book called DINOSAUR CIRCUS (above & below) and pretty much gets dinosaurs into whatever he works on wherever he can.



His graphic novels of "live action comics" (below) called PETE VON SHOLLY'S MORBID (from Dark Horse -- Vol. 2 is HERE) often feature dinosaurs and prehistoric themes and he even crammed them into his CRAZY HIP GROOVY GO GO WAY OUT MONSTERS mags from TwoMorrows at every turn (a parody of the ancient Monster Mags he grew up on).




His work recently adorned the cover of FOSSIL LEGENDS OF THE FIRST AMERICANS, Adrienne Mayor's fascinating new book and is often seen in the pages and on the covers of PREHISTORIC TIMES magazine. Pete has some new self-published works (a superhero satire with a naughty title; HERE DOESN'T COME THE FLYING F---! and a tongue way in cheek monster war comic called SERGEANSTEIN AND HIS MARUADIN' MONSTERS) and guess what? He managed to get dinosaurs into BOTH of them.



Buy the books from his website www.vonshollywood.com and see how! Limited copies of Dinosaur Circus are also available thru his site. He co-created a prehistoric superhero called TYRANOSTAR KING OF THE DINOSAURS with frequent collaborator Mike Van Cleave which was published as a 3-D comic by Ray Zone (shades of TOR- well two shades anyway- red and blue!)



What else? There will be a 50 card set of his faux TUROK SON OF STONE covers (above) from Dark Horse later this year and many other goodies as well.

Read a short interview with Pete HERE.
Visit the great B-Monster Site and scroll through the July ’04 column for a nice review of some of Pete’s work -- click HERE.


All art and Dinosaur Circus © Pete Von Sholly. Turok is © its current copyright holder.