“I’ve been interested in doing caricatures for as long as I can remember,” states illustrator Kevin Greene as to the origins of his interest in the caricature art form. “I was a huge fan of Al Hirschfeld and Bruce Stark (who recently passed away). They both did TV Guide covers which my parents subscribed to, so I saw a lot of their work. Also, Stark did work for the NY Daily News so I got to see his sports caricatures, which are amazing. I also read Mad Magazine where I saw Mort Drucker’s work. Incredible. His ability to do caricatures in a sequential art format is beyond belief. I still look for movie parodies that he’s done in Mad back issues and collections.”
After graduating from the High School of Art and Design and then the School of Visual Arts in New York, Kevin went on to produce caricature work for several magazines and websites, as well as creating caricatures of iconic science fiction characters, which were posted on his deviantART page. This ultimately led to Kevin compiling a collection of his caricatures in book form for Heroes & Villains: The Science Fiction Caricature Art of Kevin Greene, which was published in October 2012: “The book sort of came about after I realized just how many sci-fi caricatures I had done. I thought maybe I could put them all together but flesh it out a bit with some background on the characters and my recollections. Being a big sci-fi fan I thought this might be a different approach to an art book.”
Heroes & Villains contains over 30 colour and black-and-white images of science fiction’s best and baddest from the world of television, along with notes and recollections from Kevin on each of the characters. Among the illustrations are Star Trek’s Captain Kirk (William Shatner and Chris Pine), Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and Khan (Ricardo Montalban); Star Wars’ Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing), Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Darth Vader; and other memorable sci-fi characters such as The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell), Superman (Christopher Reeve), General Zod (Terrence Stamp), RoboCop (Peter Weller) and Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Matt Smith.
If you’re a sci-fi fan, you’ll find much to enjoy in Heroes & Villains; my personal favourites include Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) from Blade Runner, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) from Aliens, and The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling. Take a look…
You can purchase Heroes & Villains: The Science Fiction Caricature Art of Kevin Greene via Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and be sure to visit Kevin on deviantART for more examples of his work.