It's a production that takes three months in advance to perfect, and it necessitates a team of dedicated artists, designers and technicians.īishop first joined the band in 1986 as the original Beefcake the Mighty. They've appeared onstage dressed as barbaric interplanetary warriors whose adventures we've heard unfold over 13 studio albums, numerous singles, videos and comics. The shock-rock band sprayed the audience with fake blood and ejaculated and pissed on them with fake bodily fluids. Throughout their career, Bishop says, GWAR never wanted to be like Slayer and “play the same damn songs over and over again.” They tried it for a short time in the '90s with their early albums, earning accolades from critics and a Grammy Award nomination for Best Long Form Music Video. But what is more interesting is the fact that you have this unique combination of artists and musicians working today.” “What we do on stage is fun and people love it and that is the product we put out. “So, this has always been the most interesting part of GWAR to me,” Bishop says. The long-awaited documentary has a limited theatrical run, but hits the Shudder streaming service on July 21. The band will be playing in Dallas on Oct.
It also includes never-before-seen footage of GWAR frontman Dave Brockie, the legendary Oderus Urungus, who died of a heroin overdose in 2014. This Is GWAR is a documentary that takes fans behind GWAR’s black magic and tells the inside story of the monster band with interviews from past and present members and artists such as Alex Winter, Bam Margera and Weird Al Yankovic. GWAR is forever changed, and it is a good thing.”Īnother surprising thing to happen: GWAR’s latest offering. “So some surprising things happen,” he adds. This idea of the multiverse is real, and it is here because people are plugged into whatever perception of the image of the world, that sort of sense of fractured existence. “We wrote about how people have lost trust, people have lost truth, can’t agree on simple facts, like people choosing their own realities. “The world looks a lot different now,” Bishop says. Released in late June, The New Dark Ages and The Duoverse of Absurdity offer another adventure, an Avengers kind of scenario, for Blóthar the Berserker, guitarist BälSäc the Jaws o' Death, bassist Beefcake the Mighty and drummer JiZMak da Gusha. Not all the stories are related, and not everything in the comic is on the album.” It puts you in the emotional space, and that is what music does for the comic. You can almost think of it as poetry plus. “It’s difficult to invoke a mood with a comic book and that is the strength of music. “Two products have this piece of art that relate to one other,” says GWAR vocalist Mike Bishop, aka Blóthar the Berserker, of the dual release. The battle, fueled by GWAR's latest album The New Dark Ages, unfolds in the pages of Z2 Comics’ new graphic novel GWAR: In The Duoverse of Absurdity. The Scumdogs of the Universe army stood beside him, stoked and ripped. There was no Bruce Campbell on that lone hill overlooking the undead swarm. A wave of them, thousands strong, appeared on the battlefield, armed with iPhones, filters and social media accounts. Their gray and blue uniforms, dirtied and bloodstained, were the only remnants of a cause that was never lost. Their flesh, or what was left of it, hung in tatters from their bones. Blóthar the Berserker looked upon the Civil War soldiers crawling from their graves around Richmond, Virginia, where the band GWAR was founded in 1984.