This project has come a long way since my first rough Rube Goldbergesque conceptual thumbnails a year ago (see image below). I’ve been working very hard on this with producer Ari Cohen of Big Cheeks Studio on & off since 2015 & now I’m incredibly pleased to announce that my new animated short Building 108 will be having its world premiere on the big screen at the prestigious Fantasia International Film Festival this Saturday, July 16 at 5:15 PM. And I couldn’t be happier that it’s opening for Anna Biller’s new film The Love Witch since I’m already a huge fan of her first feature Viva! This is going to be an amazing screening! Get your tickets now HERE!

We’re hoping this initial pilot episode develops into a series of some sort. Here’s our official synopsis: “Building 108 chronicles the misadventures of a ragtag trio of young broke mutant musicians who live & rehearse in a dilapidated building in a post-apocalyptic predatory urban environment that has pesky hazards like bumbling hucksters, zombies, & aliens from other planets & dimensions around every corner. Each episode is based around the charmingly quirky way the crew fends off a different antagonist to their routine of trying to make ends meet and playing music at their neighborhood hangouts.”

Montreal Music Trivia: Did you know that the theme song for Building 108 was written & performed by one of the longest lasting post-punk bands anywhere, The American Devices? And the voice(s) of Building 108’s character “Cobweb” is/are by Sacral Nerves singer Esther Splett? BTW come see my band Sacral Nerves play with Ishi Tishi & Nobro this Monday night, July 18 at Bar Le Ritz PDB (179 Jean Talon West)!

“Braindead,” one of the characters from Building 108 says; “Come see my new movie!”

Original rough Rube Goldbergesque conceptual thumbnail from 2015. (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

Here’s an animated GIF I made using cover art I just completed for Montreal musician Nicolas Caloia’s new CD “Les Bonnes Histoires.” It’s being launched Thursday, December 10, from 5 to 8 at La Vitrola (4602 St-Laurent).

When you’re so broke you can’t even afford to eat, what else are you gonna do but draw a comic about it? As the day winds down, twiddling your thumbs fretting over another fruitless 24 hours gone by after desperately trying to rectify the situation to no avail, it’s good to have something to channel your nervous energy into lest you go stark raving bonkers. I decided to beat the counterproductivity by disciplining myself to do at least one creative thing a day. For 22 days in April/May of 2015, I secretly documented my broke ass trying to get by on nickels & dimes on my first Tumblr page ever. Hilarity tries to ensue. The gimmick was that I had to make one biographical drawing per day in under a minute but I dropped the ball when I got too busy with other stuff so I decided to delete the whole page. Here published in print for the first time are all my sloppy automatic unrehearsed drawings from that now-deceased “One Minute Worries” Tumblr page. I actually don’t even think a single person ever saw it back then because I never bothered to follow anyone on Tumblr. Come check out the launch of my brand new ACTION PACKED 24-page mini-comic “One-Minute Worries” at this year’s Expozine, Saturday & Sunday, November 14 & 15 @ Eglise St-Enfant-Jésus, 5035, Saint Dominique, Montreal. I’ll have a table there & will be selling other goodies dirt cheap like my Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes 1 & 2.

$5 POSTAGE NOT INCLUDED (FOR MAIL ORDER CONTACT RICK TREMBLES THROUGH THIS WEBSITE).

Only 100 measly bucks for original background art from an animated film I made about unspeakable events that take place on a bed! The short premiered at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival in 2006 & doubled as an unairable “music video” for a song by The American Devices that I sang & played guitar on. Most of the animation was actually done in the late 80’s so it’s very “of its era.” By the early 90’s I was able to do a B&W line-test for it using a school’s 16MM Oxberry Camera AKA torture device. Budget restrictions prevented me from synching it to the music & completing it in color (back then you had to do that with paint on expensive sheets of acetate). I managed to get it finished digitally by the early 2000’s when that finally became affordable. More deets below or contact me for info. You can watch the whole music video by clicking on the frame-grab with the soldiers below or HERE. (To see BG image below full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

Original art for sale for $100.00 CAD. Color pencil on 8.5 X 11 inch paper (signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back). Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

DECENSORTIZED

Iddy biddy power lovin’ liberator,
Doing you & me a favor,
In this institute of harm avoidance,
Hurting’s just an intuitive annoyance,
Not always mutually synchronized,
And so we ask not for confessions,
Of any personal recessions,
Beneficial or bourgeois,
But that we all be equalized,
“Liberation.” Liberate me!
And at your disposal are,
Sensations of generic stock penetrations,
Groping at some sort of duty memory,
Instead keep on sustaining cum-pensation,
Go & redefine some dead-ication,
And all the while do not prolong,
Puberty so free & strong,
“Liberation.” Liberate me!
Neuter-lize my cerebellum,
With your quality truth serum,
Decensortized!
And so this will provide us less
Much less, yeah,
Newfangled morals to confess,
Much less, yeah,
Not always mutually synchronized,
Why second guess & go defend what’s best unseen,
Be more than willing make room for what’s obscene.
“Liberation.” Liberation!

© 1990 Rick Trembles

I used to love making flipbooks in the late-70’s/early-80’s. Movie equipment & film stock was so expensive it was out of the question, so flipbooks were actually the cheapest way to make cartoons. Mine were usually done with close to a hundred hand-drawn 1.5 inch square images stacked on 3 inch card stock, then wrapped in tape on the side they’re supposed to be held. I called this one GREY BRAINS.

I did comics for Montreal’s Vice Magazine from 1994 to 2000. It started off as the surrealistic horror/screwball adventures of “Rodney Chomp” & morphed into autobiographical “80’s Diaries” where I transcribed my own diary entries from the 1980’s & embellished them with brand new cartoon depictions. When they fucked off to the states & dumped me, they stole the title & gave it to someone else to continue as a serialized text column. Original art for sale @ 100 bucks. More deets below or contact me for info. (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

SOLD Original art for sale for $100.00 CAD. Color acrylic paint on board measuring 13.5 X 5 inches, signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back. Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

Before Julie Doucet’s “Dirty Plotte” mini-comix started getting published by Drawn & Quarterly, she was doing it DIY from the Plateau-Mont-Royal were I was also living. Late-eighties, I would bump into her sometimes at Bar Bifteck & she asked me to contribute something to a new mini she was doing with Martin Lemm. I bashed out this story about two moms fed up with their dysfunctional family life who decide to form a rock band, then hand-delivered it to Julie down the street where she was assembling the rest of the issue on her kitchen table cluttered with artwork & drawing materials. Original art for sale @ 150 bucks. More deets below or contact me for info. (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

Original art for sale for $150.00 CAD. Includes two 7.5 X 12 inch pages of original finished B&W inks on paper, signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back. Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

Cold Vomit Comix (1989) front cover drawing of Martin Lemm by Julie Doucet.

Cold Vomit Comix (1989) back cover drawing of Julie Doucet by Martin Lemm.

Vice Magazine was founded by assholes. I drew comix for them from their inception in 1994 when they were getting money from welfare, until sacks of tech dough got plopped into their laps circa 2000 & they fucked off to the States thumbing their noses at many of the Montrealers who helped make them what they are for zero compensation. By the time they dumped me, my biographical series had gotten more streamlined than this early 1997 submission & started concentrating on actual diary entries I’d written in the eighties. This strip was transitional, as I was shedding the “Rodney Chomp” characters I began with so I could focus on my own personal reminiscences as requested. Once I was outta there, they stole the new title I’d been using for this strip, “Eighties Diaries,” & gave it to someone else to continue as a serialized text column of their own. In this submission I drew myself hanging out around smoked meat joint The Main, & sitting on my favorite park bench in Parc du Portugal across from where I was living on Vallières & St-Laurent bitching about how Vice didn’t pay their artists & wouldn’t give my band any coverage despite frequently running puff-pieces on their own musical projects. And FYI, I did NOT become a heroin addict like the “cliffhanger” implies; I was only poking fun at the bad rep I couldn’t shake off that’d been following me around since the eighties largely via guilt by association, something that got explored further in future submissions. Hey! Now YOU can be the first person to pay me for all the crap I did for Vice! STOP ME FROM BECOMING A HEROIN ADDICT! (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

SOLD Original art for sale for $100.00 CAD. B&W ink & acrylic paint on 13 X 4.5 inch Illustration Board (it’s laid out square here to make it easier to read online). Signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles on the back. Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

“Fuck the Esso-Terrix, start with a Big Bang!” How Orwellian can you get? Zeitgeistastic 1984 Montreal post-underground-comix/post-punk-schmuck memorabilia applicable to any old era and/or one-horse-town, including the one you’re presently stewing in your own stink in: For. Only. Ninety. Nine. Commiserateable. Bucks! Featuring a Walt Kellyesque critter sniffing around someone’s heavenly wide-open Jugheaded rump! Or is that cavity part of a horrifyingly self-satisfied S. Clay Wilsonian pirate face’s schnozzle? Who “nose” what was going thru acid-addled Rick Trembles’ brainpan when he scribbled this final filler half-page to Sugar Diet Magazine #1! Best of all, the original art includes a perfectly intact, ancient history, sliced swatch of Roy Lichtensteinerrific dot Zip-A-Tone (in the first panel)! Its shiny glossiness is blinding my face as I write! It’s the kinda irreproducible sheen that simply cannot be translated to a computer screen, akin to Skratch ‘N Sniff & Sensurround™! You have to coddle it in your hands face-to-face to fully experience its historical significance! “Pass the ointments because it’s PARANOIARAMA”! (Seen here: Actual yellowing tear-sheet from the published work. To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

Original 1984 art for sale (with Zip-A-Tone) for only $99.00 CAD. Includes finished B&W inks (signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back). 8 X 6 inches on thin, white card-stock. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.

Here’s another feature I illustrated for the late Al Goldstein’s long-running NYC-based smut review Screw Magazine. “Jungle Cum Carny” explores the inner-workings & secret disciplinary dungeon of a salacious sideshow at a sleazy carnival. I was trying to do a smutty Grand Guignol homage to exploitation movie pioneers Herschell Gordon Lewis & David F. Friedman (explicit sex mandatory when submitting work to Screw). “Another day, another jungle-cum fume drenched dollar!” Also published in Montreal’s Image Gun #1. (To see image full-sized, click on it to open in a new window & use the magnify function).

SOLD SPECIAL DEAL: All 4 pages of the original art for sale for only $200.00 CAD. Includes the cover art (not seen here), the 3-page story, all pencil art preliminaries, all original finished B&W inks (signed & dated by author/artist Rick Trembles in pencil on the back), & a bonus copy of the issue of Screw that everything was published in! Postage & framing not included. Motion Picture Purgatory Volumes One & Two available at FAB Press. For original art info, contact Rick Trembles @ ricktrembles (at) hotmail (dot) com.