Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Oh, I've finally decided my future lies beyond the yellow brick road.

Study of a Tang Dynasty Funerary Figure

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

The Nelson-Atkins Museum here in Kansas City has a world-class Asian collection and these funerary figures have been favorites of mine since I was a kid. Their stylized nature gives them a timelessness but also an immediacy. So to keep with that I also went a bit more stylized with the paint, applying a wash of pastel colors to then build upon, letting those pinks and light oranges inform the other layers of pigment applied over them. I think the bubblegum-y colors also give a nice contrast to the figure’s menacing gaze.

Card subject to change.

Rob’s Art on ShopAEW
###
Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
###
Rob’s prints and shirts at Pro Wrestling Tees
###
Bluesky
Cara
YouTube

My wife Katy’s latest book Oldest Kansas City is now ready for preorder! She’s worked really hard on this, doing deep research in all corners of the city to find as many gems and stories as possible.

Here’s the description:

If you’ve met Katy, you know exactly what her unique energy is all about and how passionate she gets about telling the stories of others. Preorders are really important to a book’s success, so it would mean a lot to us if you could get one for yourself. They start shipping on September 1st. Thanks!

(Today’s her birthday, so it’d be extra cool to pick one up!)

The first two episodes of Aliens: Earth are simply amazing. I went into this show with high expectations and I was still blown away. It’s epic in scale and ideas yet still emotionally intelligent and centered. So when big things happen (and trust me, big things happen) they have way more meaning because we care about the characters that they’re happening to. If you’re unfamiliar with the high concept, a ship that’s been overrun by aliens crash lands on Earth and finally brings the terror back home. To me, the Alien franchise works best when it’s the formula of introducing horror to another genre. The first one is sci-fi, the second action, and the third drama. So, these first two episodes are kind of like introducing horror to the movie The Raid. And yeah, it’s awesome. Plus there’s some outstanding commentary on corporations and the soulless billionaires that run them and the introduction of tranhumanism to the Alien mythology. It all creates an incredible depth that is unlike anything else. Plus, there’s a needle drop at the end of episode two paired with A Moment that straight up made my hairs stand on end.

Last Sunday Katy and I went to see Weapons and we loved every minute of it. I’m not going to say much more about it because it’s a full on experience, but if you haven’t seen it yet avoid all spoilers and go see it in a theater as soon as you can. You can thank me later.

I’ve started watching the new season of King of the Hill and I wasn’t prepared for how special this is. The high concept of it is that Hank and Peggy spent the last several years in a company town in Saudi Arabia and they’re returning to a wholly different America. Bobby is now a young man running a restaurant in town, so we get the combination of a new dynamic of him being an adult with a new type of relationship, and also Hank and Peggy essentially having a Beverly Hillbillies-type reaction to this new world of electric cars, poke restaurants, and how the Covid pandemic affected everyone. It’s a really cool and very humanistic way to comment on the world we live in.

Friday I finished reading Absolute Wonder Woman volume one by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Mattia De Iulis, and Jordie Bellaire and it’s easily one of my favorite Wonder Woman stories ever (in no order that list includes the George Perez run, the Brian Azzarello/ Cliff Chiang run and Jill Thompson’s The True Amazon). It’s a full reimagining of the character and her mythos, though it’s still all closely tied to Greek myth. This was my first full experience with Sherman’s art, which has Moebius vibes with JH Williams III panel layouts and it’s absolutely perfect for this book.

I brought a couple books with me for our weekend getaway. The first was Radiant Black volume five by Kyle Higgins, Joe Clark, Marcelo Costa, Eduardo Ferigato and friends, which has a really fascinating storytelling device in it. The characters have been preparing for an invasion by alien robots (naturally) and it’s finally happening. What’s extra cool, beyond punching giant robots, is the way they’re telling the story. The mantle of Radiant Black is being shared by two friends and they have to pick which one of them will carry it full time and the story is a sort of Schrodinger’s Box following how events would carry out if each of them were in this robot crisis event. Super cool approach to this type of story.

This morning I read Void Rivals volume two by Robert Kirkman and Lorenzo de Felici. It’s deepening the mysteries of this new ring-shaped world and how it relates to Cybertron from the Transformers. It’s sort of a spacefaring Romeo and Juliet with huge action and lots of intrigue and a total blast to read.

Here’s a wonderful thing: This DJ put together a 3 hour mix utilizing every DJ break that Howard Hessman’s Dr Johnny Fever did in WKRP in Cincinnati! We listened to it on our drive Friday and it’s spectacular.

The aforementioned drive was for us to go to the Oz Museum in Wamego, KS for Katy’s birthday. They recently got a fairly major temporary addition to their collection and it felt like a perfect excuse to finally go check out the museum.

The 1939 MGM movie is obviously the draw, but they have a lot of other really cool stuff from the books and the other productions that L Frank Baum did before the movie. I read all 14 of his Oz books as a kid and they hold a dear spot in my memory so I was honestly as excited to see the exhibits related to them as those dedicated to the movie.

There was also a nice display about the stage plays that Baum put on and his other Oz-related films from the early 1900’s. I knew about the prior movies and I’ve seen snippets from them but I didn’t know about the plays, so that was cool to learn.

But man, the collection from the movie is spectacular. Props, costumes, production and design work, it was truly marvelous to see all of it. That concept drawing above was especially rad.

But the crown jewel that got us to go was the model of Dorothy’s house that got whisked away by the tornado in the movie. I heard Katy exhale when she saw it!

As a kid it was a big deal when it came on TV, normally once a year around winter time. When I was really little I couldn’t handle when Elmyra Gulch would turn into the Witch and I’d have to run away and hide each time (same with Bill Bixby turning into The Hulk). Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion were as much superheroes to me as Superman and Batman and as beloved as Big Bird or Mr Rogers.

Getting to see some real things from the movie is significant. Like, have you ever seen videos of adults getting to walk through the Sesame Street set and breaking down crying? It was kind of like that for me.

There’s also some cool memorabilia and props from subsequent productions and movies, like Oz on Ice (yes, really, and it had these amazing Flying Monkey swords that are for sure not marital aids, ya freak), the Wiz, Return to Oz, Muppets Wizard of Oz and Wicked.

That monkey sword is so rad. It’s all I can think about now.

Monkey dildo swords aside, the thing that’s stuck with me the most was this yellow brick from Baum’s childhood, a likely source for the Yellow Brick Road. You never know where inspiration will come from or where it will take you!

Love you more,
Rob