Haunted Hop 2025

My biggest illustration project of every year since 2017 is here! The Haunted Hop is upon us and Jonathan Toubin is once again bringing out the big guns for his 20th annual Halloween bash. I’ve been going with a different layout the last couple years and have been shifting the main figure off to the side and letting the text take over as the main focus and it has made me life so much easier. These posters are gigantic puzzles and getting the layout feeling harmonious by breaking up the center of the page can be quite the uphill battle some years. I think we do manage to pull it off with varying degrees of success but I have accepted that these posters are our own Coachella posters and I just have to put my desire to draw aside, slightly.

That being said, I still do get a good amount of drawing in here and instead of drawing one specific headliner this year we went with a seance scene with Martin Rev, Marshall Allen and Jonathan Toubin conjuring some of the spirits of the Room Full of Mirror bands that are being covered. There’s little Lux Interior, Ronnie Spector, Klaus Nomi and Joey Ramone ghosts floating about with a big Lou Reed ghost, accompanied by a little Andy Warhol ghost, as the main focus. Lou and the VU are the godfathers of the NYC punk/art rock scene and we decided to have Lou’s spirit loom large over this year since so many of the bands playing and bands being covered are from NYC.

Get those tickets asap! There’s only a few weeks left until the big party at the Knockdown Center on Friday, October 31st and this baby will sell out. Process pics below.

Notes to self as I get to the end of the project. These always help to keep me from getting lost in the sauce as I have teeny tiny details to finish all over the piece.