Space Ghost's Secret Base

CLIENT: Forrest J. ("Uncle Forry") Ackerman, Publisher of "Famous Monsters Magazine," the publisher who coined the term "Sci-Fi."

MATERIALS: Forrest had my three Argonaut Anthologies posters and a number of my original Aurora finished model kits along with some that were built by Directors John Landis and Tobe Hooper. He asked for me to just sketch something out and sign it for him in 2000 while my wife and UFO author buddy Don Schmitt explored his museum collection. To which Forest further produced a goldenrod sheet of copier paper and various pens and inks and pencils and I found other office supplies in his kitchen and around his house up in the Los Feliz neighborhood of eastern Hollywood. More office supplies and his late wife's letter-writing correspondence drawer provided the last of my tools I needed for this sketch illustration. It took me five hours.

INSPIRATIONS: I'll never get over how much Hanna Barbera's September 1966 "Space Ghost's "original star cruiser concept design (designed by Alex Toth) of the "Phantom Way" resembles the basic concept of my general detective's composite from all of the witnesses who described the Roswell crashed aerospace/aerosurf waverider command module craft. The cut of her lines, the draft and the aero/hydrodynamics of this cartoon spaceship is shockingly similar to my witness descriptions collected and rendered between 1993 and 1995.

BACK STORY: One of "Space Ghost's" secret bases is a hanger complex inside an asteroid in low orbit around a Venus-like runaway greenhouse planet orbiting a yellow dwarf Gliese 710 otherwise known as ‎Barnard's Star. American Astronauts and Russian Cosmonauts as well as those from other countries help service the installation.