The client, Crazy Ray wanted something a little scarier this year, so I set about to create that. It’s the same character as in previous iterations, and the logotype has remained the same over the years. So why not? We tell a different story with this character. He’s a little more equipped in this one, with lady finger bandoliers, scraps of a shirt, an active roman candle, and behind him looms Stevenson(?), just post WMD.

Much of my research time was spent studying mushroom clouds, nuclear ones in particular. I had a lot of development and test footage rolling in the background as I worked, with its carefully crafted 50s Boston native calmly narrating the virtue of both keeping a clean side yard in the event of nuclear exchange, and the righteous accomplishment of creating such a destructive device. Looking at the classic shot at Castle Bravo still haunts me, with its red monochrome and lifelessness.

I didn’t want to go quite into nuclear because of its stigma, and my own revulsion to it, so I selected a fuel station explosion, which had the right shape. I added a lot of layers of underpainting and modification to it to make it more generic and wispy, more cloud-like.