The Ultra Series

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Client: Hero Complex Gallery | Curator: Adam Smasher | Date: AUG 2013

We grew up watching these guys save our planet everyday, either shooting the Spacium Ray or throwing the Eye Slugger at every big bastard monster willing to destroy the scale cities used as battle scenes. They were our heroes, our giant shiny heroes.

Ultraman and Ultraseven are my contributions for Hero Complex Gallery's exhibition Bleeding Metallics, a great show featuring artwork with metallic inks, paints, paper and metal itself. Four limited series of 25, size 18" x 24", were produced for the show, two printed in white paper and 2 in metallic silver paper available here:

Ultraman on White | Ultraman on Metallic | Ultraseven on White | Ultraseven on Metallic

I had so much fun working on these that I'm really considering making the whole Ultra Family. So, stay tunned.

The Ultra Series is the collective name for all the shows produced by Tsuburaya Productions featuring Ultraman, his many brethren, and the myriad Ultra Monsters. The Ultra Series is one of the prominent tokusatsu superhero genre productions from Japan, and its franchise is also one of the most well known examples of the daikaiju genre, which also includes Toho's Godzilla films, and Daiei Film's Gamera series. The Ultra Series also falls into the kyodai (Giant Hero) sub-genre of Tokusatsu shows- wikipedia

And I mean it when I say I'm a long time fan, here's one of my oldest drawings, probably from late 70s or early 80s. A flying "Ultrasevem" and his gang fighting a huge dancing disco monster with shells bigger than tanks!