Brendan McCarthy is a comic book artist and a massive Mad Max fan. In the 80’s he even co-wrote and did the art for a comic called Freakwave which was basically a pre-Waterworld ‘Mad Max goes surfing’ strip. He bugged George Miller over the years, sending in art and ideas. Eventually they met up, and Miller and McCarthy started writing a script for a new Mad Max film together, with McCarthy designing the characters, tribes, and vehicles as he went along.
The artwork that you are seeing here is some of McCarthy’s defining, early thoughts on the film. Brendan conceived of The Buzzards, the buzzsaw-wielding spikey vehicles that run amok on the Fury Road. He dreamt up the ‘retro hotrod gangster’ look of the Armada vehicles, to move this installment away from the ‘dune buggy’ style of the previous trilogy. After George gave Brendan a torn-out photo of an acrobat on a pole and wondered if he could ‘do anything with that?’, McCarthy transformed the acrobats into a mobile, feral boarding party: the Pole Cats.
Feast your eyes on the kickass concept art for Mad Max: Fury Road. You can check out Brendan McCarthy’s art here.
