"Unkle" Eric Pigors is the demented, mutant cartoonist offspring of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Basil Wolverton. His delightfully deranged lowbrow art channels E.C. Comics, Dr. Caligari, Hot Stuff, Zacherley, and Old School tattoos of dice, daggers and flying skulls, all in radioactive colors playing to a Death Metal soundtrack.
Pigors worked for 15 years as a Disney animator but, like Tim Burton, it was only after he severed that relationship — with an executioner’s bloody rubber-bladed axe, no doubt — that he was able to give full vent to his demons, unleashing a toxic torrent of terrifying toons etched with equal parts sulphuric acid and Kool-Aid on all manner of merchandize including comic books, t-shirts, shot glasses, greeting cards, posters, belt buckles and toys. He has also committed a slew of CD covers and kustom kreature designs for the kind of rock bands whose names evoke industrial accidents, and who turn their amps up to eleven.
Pigors draws ghastly graveyard ghouls and dilapidated corpses with exposed ribs and lolling tongues; busty, bat-winged babes in red satin-lined coffins, and two-headed, chainsaw-wielding morgue attendants.
I am particularly fond, wouldn’t you know, of his oversized dayglo-green Frankenstein Monsters with goofy grins, gorilla-length arms and way, WAY too many stitches and clamps barely keeping the parts together. His "Bridensteins" are pneumatic, purple-skinned pinups, hourglass-wrapped in tight mummy bandages.
Pigors’ art is sick, warped, disturbing, in extreme bad taste, and very, very funny. There’s a ghoulish sweetness to his work, something unusual and endearing that brings out the monster-loving kid in all of us.
Check out Eric Pigors’ Toxic Toons website and his new book, Unkle Pigor’s Cryptic Art.
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