Posted By Dan Greenfield on Sep 8, 2025 | 2 comments

MORRISON MONDAYS!

By BILL MORRISON

Does anyone remember the short-lived ’90s comic book company known as Tekno Comix? It was founded in 1993 by its parent company, Big Entertainment, but didn’t fully debut until 1995. The hook with their line of comics was that they featured characters and concepts dreamed up by big name creators in the sci-fi realm, such as Leonard Nimoy, Gene Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov, and Neil Gaiman. It was also founded by the creators of the Sci-Fi (Syfy) Channel, Mitchell Rubenstein and his business-partner wife Laurie Silvers.

I remember first being aware of the publisher when I saw their full-color, full-page ad in the 1994 San Diego Comic-Convention Souvenir Book. That was the same year that Bongo Comics had its first booth at San Diego, and Steve Vance and I had the privilege of drawing the Simpsons on the Souvenir Book cover. What struck me about the Tekno Comix ad wasn’t that it promised comics by celebrity creators, it was that it used artwork that I had painted a decade earlier for my first movie poster. And not just a redrawn, repainted representation of my art, but the actual illustration!

In 1984, I was a young illustrator working at an advertising agency in Hollywood known as B.D. Fox and Friends Inc. Because I was young and lacking in experience, I worked mostly drawing concept sketches and painting comps for big-budget movie posters and ads. The final illustration gigs went to more seasoned freelance illustrators.

But one day I was given the assignment to paint not one, but two finished posters for a low-budget science fiction/horror/musical comedy called Voyage of the Rock Aliens. The plot of the film involves a band of new wave spacemen (played mostly by the rock band, Rhema, an “80’s pop schlock techno cheese band”) who come to Earth in a guitar-shaped spaceship in search of the source of rock and roll music. The leader of the group falls for a high school singer and interrupts the Grease-style romance between her and the leader of a local rockabilly band.

The film stars Pia Zadora (Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Butterfly), Craig Sheffer (Some Kind of Wonderful), and Tom Nolan (Fast Times at Ridgemont High… he played Judge Reinhold’s boss at All-American Burger), and features Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes), and national treasure, Ruth Gordon. It also features a song, “When the Rain Begins to Fall,” by Zadora and Jermaine Jackson that was released as a 12-inch single (backed with “Justine” by Jimmy and the Mustangs who appear in the film as members of The Pack, Sheffer’s character’s rock band.)

Just so there’s no misunderstanding about my artistic abilities at the time, the images of Pia Zadora and Craig Sheffer in both posters are photos that I retouched, and I drew and painted everything else.

The poster artwork that was appropriated in 1994 as part of the Tekno Comix logo was the robotic hand with guitar pick fingernails, which I drew and painted for the Voyage of the Rock Aliens teaser poster. The company also recreated my mechanical hand as part of an animated logo display for their retail store in the Mall of America.

And I recall that there was also a giant sculpted display of the robot hand clutching the Tekno Comix disc at the publisher’s San Diego Comic-Con booth the same year the ad appeared in the Souvenir Book. I visited that booth and came away with a promotional ring that features my robot hand.

Because the reproduction of the hand is extremely crisp in the Tekno Comix ads, I can only assume they used a transparency of my painting. (This was in the days before artwork was delivered in the form of computer files.) It isn’t a second-generation image. I still own the original art, and I know they didn’t ask me to photograph it. Therefore, they probably had permission or a license from the film company to use the artwork.

But then again, who knows? It’s still a mystery to me. This was the first time my art was used without my knowledge or permission, but certainly not the last. The most famous case of this involves a painting that sold for nearly $15,000,000, but that’s a story for another time.

Regarding Voyage of the Rock Aliens, I haven’t seen the film since the day it was screened for me prior to painting the posters, but I hear that since the 2K restoration Blu-ray release in 2022, it’s become a bit of a cult hit.

Watching the trailer with its new wave music, ’80s fashions, and colliding genre tropes of the day, I’m thinking it might be time to give it another viewing.

It looks like a fun, tubular time-trip back to 1984!

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