Meet David Slade's Fubear & Meatdog

By The Woman In Black
August 14th, 2008

Not content to rest on his directorial laurels, David (Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night) Slade has created something called Fubear that has definitely piqued my interest … and probably will yours, too.

According to a press release from IDW Publishing, "Fubear is the schism that exists between 'funny ha-ha' and 'funny-strange'.” It's also a small, square hardcover collection of illustrations that wound up inspiring Slade to come up with his animated comic/horror short "Meatdog: What’s Fer Dinner.” IDW will be releasing Fubear Studios later this month (click here to pre-order it from EvilShop), but "Meat Dog" has its own unique release strategy: It will play to the over seven million users of Xbox Live this fall (which we first told you about here).

Apparently Slade is quite the talented artist, and he had this to say about the process he used to get in touch with that aspect of himself, "Making films, dark thrillers, sometimes you need some light, but it has to be sincere, so I set off in search of my psyche in just my underwear, taking with me a handgun, a crutch, a pencil, and a shovel. In the end they all came to play, but mostly just the pencil. The pencil became a computer and various printing techniques, and that most recently became animation. I love learning craft and technique, and I delve into my psyche to get the meat."

"Meatdog" involves a church of evil occult pigs, a carnivorous rabbit, and a slobbering hound in pursuit of the title character. The Fubear Studios hardcover vividly introduces us to not only Meatdog himself (a dog made of meat cuts), but also Bearleftbear (obsessive-compulsive bear in a car), the Alienbears (hungry, carnivorous octarian creatures from another universe), "Drumming Dogs," "Hazmat Bears" from a chemical psychoverse, and many more.

Sign me up! Chemical psychoverses are my favorite kind!

- Debi Moore