The title character of one of my all time favorite films, the 1974 rock-n-roll-comedy-horror-fantasy-musical from director Brian De Palma, which was also a darkly humorous hybrid of three famous gothic tales; "Phantom of the Opera", "Faust" and "A Picture of Dorian Gray".

Winslow Leach (William Finley) was a struggling and unknown composer whose lengthy cantata based on the story of "Faust" is stolen right under his innocent, dimwitted noise by Swan, a ruthless and powerful though rather mysterious record mogul (played against type by Paul Williams). In an attempt to see Swan about the situation leads Winslow to meet and fall in love with another struggling artist, a naive but kind singer named Phoenix. Sadly Winslow's life gets far worse when Swan frames him for crimes he didn't commit and is imprisoned for them.

Now although Winslow is a pretty pleasant guy and all, he is capable of sudden bursts of extreme violent rage. And when he discovers that Swan is butchering his life's work for the opening of his rock palace dubbed the Paradise, he escapes from jail and goes on a wonderfully cartoonish rampage. But it ends in tragedy when he is brutally injured and deformed at one of Swan's record warehouses and falls into the nearby sea, presumed to be dead by the rest of the world. But like his inspirational namesake, Winslow returns from the dead so to speak, and dons a cool super villain-style bird getup to become the Phantom of the Paradise, in his attempts to have revenge against Swan and his many employees!

The Phantom himself is one of those horror movie maniacs who come off more like a comic book character (the Tall Man from the "Phantasm" films is another fine example), and thus he is a very fun and appealing design that I just had to draw myself. This is also the first of several illustrations based on NON-GIANT monster movie characters that I plan on doing in the near future, as well as another upload for Halloween 2008. And although the red collar is a little inaccurate to the original suit, I'm quite proud of how this one came out.

And because "Phantom of the Paradise" has a relatively small cult following, compared to that of another musical-macabre favorite "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", I thought I should spread the love and present just some other DA members' renditions of poor vengeful Winslow;

From Grimcinder: [link]
From Ballsybalsman: [link]
From Monsterfink: [link]
From Zoe-Lacchei: [link]
From Anchormoth: [link]
From RR-DF-RaptorRed (stupid but funny one): [link]
From Anchormoth: [link]

There is a whole lot more fan pieces then just these few, so please use the DA search engine. And of course, you can't do the Phantom justice, without mentioning his insidious use of a toilet plunger: [link]

Finally, from CorvusMelodus: [link]