My mom is putting out some book about the Saints or something, and wants me to do an illustration of the holy spirit for it. Nothing fancy. Just some line work to break up text on a page. I’ve done some random religious illustrations for her sorta weird religious books before. Some of which were pretty neat. I had one where I made Jesus look like this cool wizard (which he is, really). We actually had a kids book that she wrote and I illustrated about going to Church, which she was shopping around to publishers for a while. She never got any bites though, and the project was shelved. The drawings were pretty cool, but the whole thing kinda made me feel like i was selling out.

As a result, I concocted the idea of making kids books that weren’t mindlessly religious, and which would reverse program them. The idea I came up with was about a little boy whose dog gets hit by a car, unbeknownst to him. His parents say the dog ran away, so the boy stays up outside waiting for him for a couple nights, until he is visited by the dog’s ghost in a dream. He wakes up, and follows a trail of luminous footprints into the woods, and eventually into a cave, which leads under ground to the City of Hell.

There is this one awesome scene where the boy is wandering around scared, and he gets spotted by a little boy skeleton who is walking along with his momma skeleton, and the little skeleton screams and tells her about it, and she says something to the effect of “Shush! There’s no such thing as living boys!” Ahhh, what marvelous irony that is! The undead suggesting there as no such thing as the living! It makes me so proud of myself.

Anyway, the boy draws a lot of attention from decaying mangled zombie and skeleton dogs roaming the streets of hell. They start following him en masse. Ultimately, something happens, and the boy goes back above ground, and the dogs all follow him, which is no good. He tries to hide them in his parents barn, and go to sleep. They unfortunately start baying and howling, which awakens everyone in the neighborhood. Also, the neighbors hear the long-forgotten voices of their pet dogs, so they come running to see whats the matter.

Anyway, there is a big fucking commotion, all these gross zombie dogs slobbering on people, and them hugging skeletons and stuff. Just great stuff to illustrate. Then like some sort of demon dog-catcher from hell shows up, and makes all the dead dogs go back with him. The people get sad, and the demon feels bad, vanishes, and then comes back with puppies from Cerberus, the canine guardian of hell (who the little boy meets earlier on). The story ends with the little boy nestling into bed with a little puppy that has too many heads and belches fire, and everyone is happy.

What kid wouldn’t love that story a million times more than about what happens at Church? Oh yeah, here’s the drawing I made of the little boy which inspired the whole thing.

I’ve been meaning to make this book for over a year now. Its a really big undertaking though, so I want to do it when I’m good and ready and know I will do it right. I feel like it could be a smash hit.