Post Apocalyptic New Jersey
This all started with a crazy idea I had for my son’s Halloween costume in 2015. My initial idea was “What if Star Wars was made as a low budget movie in the 1965 rather than the late ’70s?” It would have been cobbled together with items from army surplus stores and recycled props from other movies. As I worked on the costumes and the many doodles that followed, I jettisoned the Star Wars idea and developed a tale of Post Apocalyptic New Jersey. Following a nuclear conflagration in 1981, the once verdant Garden State is reduced to a hellscape overrun by mutants, monsters and merciless marauders. The Atomic Warrior figures into this world along with a cavalcade of other freaks. This is the skeleton of a story to which I am adding flesh in my sketchbooks. It may be a comic one day.
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- Atomic Warrior Halloween 2015
- Atomic Warrior early sketch
- Loser of the Swamps
- Atomic Warrior skulks
- Atomic Warrior strikes
- You, yeah, you! Stand still, laddy!
- With this drawing, I thought COMIC!
- Atomic Warrior lights up the joint
- Which one is Pink?
- In New Jersey after the Apocalypse
- First drawing of Pink Zeppelin. He just sort of rolled out of a blue Derwent pencil
- Atomic Warrior in red
- Atomic Warrior
- First Derwent Dark Wash drawing
- King Ricky
- Thumbnail for an Atomic Warrior page drawn with my beloved mechanical pencils with red leads
- Atomic Warrior swinging an Atomic Saber
- Pink Zeppelin in a moment of calm
- Water Witch
- Butcher Shop Variation or Pink Zeppelin is Peckish
- Charge!
- Costume details
- Playing with blue and red Inktense pencils
- Atomic Warrior
- Run through
- Atomic Warrior with a raygun
- The Thief Thwarted?
- ©Joe Williams
- Doodles of the fearsome Atomic Warrior
- The hideous two-headed, mutant monster that was the horrifying result of the fusion between a Led Zeppelin fan and a Pink Floyd fan. Pink Zeppelin!
- Variation on the Atomic Warrior
- The two-headed monster that guards the ruins of a record shop
- Atomic Warrior
- Atomic Warrior
- Whoops
- A swing and a miss
- Pencil and watercolor
- Pink Zeppelin Attacks!
- The Jersey Legion
- The Forager weighs a situation
- Fleeing through the weeds
- The Forager
- The Little Sketchbook Intro
- SMASH!
- Coveting a treasure
- The Forager’s C.V.
- Thumbnail for a comic page
- Scavenging Trio
- Pink swings
- Trying not to think about it
- Forager
- Scavengers — The Muscle
- New Helmet
- RUN for it!
- Scavengers — The Muscle
- Tight spot
- Atomic Warrior faces Pink Zeppelin
- Atomic Warrior sword aflame
- Scavengers – the forager
- Scavengers – the muscle
- Pink Zeppelin ink
- Pink Zeppelin pencil
- The Forager
- The Muscle



































































































