The Secret Sauce – Mr. Monster/Funky Crossover

Nov 2, 2020

As I’ve noted before in this space, the Pizza Monster that’s been showing up at Montoni’s on Halloween is based on a real life Pizza Monster who materializes on All Hallows Eve at my favorite pizza palace Luigi’s. In searching for a different take on this years’s Pizza Monster arrival in the strip at Montoni’s, I thought, who better to take on the Pizza Monster than Michael T. Gilbert’s classic Mr. Monster?  So, over lunch one day, I asked Michael if would loan me his Mr. Monster for this year’s Halloween arc. Not only did he do that, but he drew Mr. M’s appearance in Funky.

Thinking you might like to see how that came about, I thought I’d uncork a jar of secret sauce and show you what we did. First the story was written and penciled leaving a place in the panel for Mr. Monster to appear. Then the pencils were Dropboxed over to Michael so he could pop-in his monster masher along with a color guide. Following that, the strips were inked and lettered, and, for total authenticity, I used Michael’s Mr. Monster typeface for the dialog in his balloons. The result was an incredibly seamless merging of characters and styles.

Michael was also kind enough to gift me his original art which I’m including here as well so you can see it in it’s full uncropped glory..

The result was a really fun crossover mash-up. Thanks again, Michael! I’ll be following-up over the next three days with the remaining panels.

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