Out in movie theaters right now is Meg 2: The Trench, the follow-up to the surprisingly popular 2018 giant-shark movie in which action star Jason Statham (The Fast and the Furious and Expendables franchises) fought two megalodons; this time, he’s got a whole aquarium full of giant underwater monsters to battle!
You know who else has had an encounter with a megalodon? Our friend Bob Larkin, who’s spent a four-decade career painting all manner of colossal beasts from beneath the sea—as well as from outer space!—in a host of covers and movie posters for just about every publishing house and film studio.
Doc Savage, Dazzler, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, Piranha, Night of the Creeps, Humanoids from the Deep, and Godzilla are just some of the painted images you’re already familiar with, even if you didn’t know they were Larkin’s work. He’s been an inspiration to artists like Joe Jusko and Alex Ross. Around these parts, Bob was the cover artist of my Pan novels Blood Feud and Blood Reign.
Bob’s connection to The Meg is that he was a cover artist for one of the printings of The Trench, author Steve Alten’s follow-up novel to his 1997 bestseller Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, and the basis for Statham’s Meg 2: The Trench—which means Bob got to paint a giant shark!
What you see here are the original painting and its final printed version. As to why the book has a reversed color scheme, Bob explained it this way to me:
“[The original painting] is what the art director and author wanted: an all-white shark with big teeth, in color. But then they decided to make the shark negative with the red eye; I couldn’t understand why. Scarier? They’re both scarier, to a degree. I did the painting in 1999 and didn’t sign it, like a lot of my rush covers.”
Impressive, right? But like I always like to say, it’s not just his painting skills that are impressive—Bob’s also an amazing pencil artist, as evidenced by the StarWarp Concepts art book that showcases his work. Cue the shameless plug!
The Bob Larkin Sketchbook is a collection of some of Bob’s incredible pencil drawings, and what you’ll discover when you see them—behind that eye-catching cover featuring Ms. Zwieback—is how wide-ranging his subjects are. Sci-fi, horror, Westerns, pulp adventure, crime fiction, movie merchandise, even wrestling stars—as we say on the book’s back cover, there really is little that he hasn’t painted.
The sketchbook also features three pieces created especially for it: the Pan-portrait cover art; a portrait of Patricia Savage, the fightin’ cousin of pulp fiction’s top-tier adventurer, Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze; and a two-page spread in which Doc faces off against another Golden Age crimefighter—The Shadow!
The Bob Larkin Sketchbook is available in print and digital formats. Visit its product page at StarWarp Concepts for ordering information.