iFanboy Upstarts: Jeff Zornow

Some creators easily fit easily into the super-hero genre that dominates American comics, but others work outside the realm of capes and cowls and show there’s more to comics than Superman and Spider-man. This week’s iFanboy Upstart highlights the work of Jeff Zornow, who would surely be a top EC Comics’ artist had the company survived the advent of the comics Code. Zornow specializes in horror comics and dinosaurs and as his art shows,  if you’re drawing dinosaurs and there isn’t some fear and horror involved, you’re doing it wrong.

Artist Jeff Zornow first broke into comics as an inker, but quickly transitioned to drawing on his own in 2005 with a story in Vampirella Magazine #10 and the indie one-shot Streetfables. After that he was quickly enlisted by IDW for its Gene Simmons House of Horror series, mixing horror with rock music in what would be come a fortuitious crossroads for Zornow. After his stint on the KISS book ended, Zornow took up a Halloween miniseries,  and some short stories for the horror/cheesecake series Grimm Fairy Tales but began to get even more work doing illustrations for metal bands’ CD covers and horror movie posters. Balancing that with comics, Zornow cranked out two OGNs — The Legend of Sleepy Hollow  and Long Night of the Full Moon — while doing artwork for bands like Fondlecorpse and Ex Dementia. In 2011, Zornow got his first Image work with the dinosaur-infested one-shot Tyrannosaurus Rex earlier this year and followed that up in doing covers for two other dino-themed series, Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters and Jurassic Park: Dangerous Games.

Zornow’s work might not fit into the mold of a Big Two artist, but the beautiful thing about comics and their diversity is that he doesn’t have to. Here’s a collection of his work, and make sure to check under your bed tonight for the monsters this might provoke.