Skook WiP #102

Greetings from the Pacific Northwest!

I’ve been feeling kinda brain dead the last few mornings. I get up, pour myself a mug of coffee and stagger down the hall to my studio. I sit at my computer and stare at the screen for a bit. Spending November writing on Daughter of Spiders was great for building the habit of writing each day. Writing instead of scrolling my social media feeds. A bunch of bad writing at least feels like I’ve made an effort. Social media scrolling can be fun and I enjoy snarking with folks but I rarely feel like I’ve accomplished anything.

I’ve gotten a bit stalled on the actual story of Daughter so I’ve been spending some time writing background i.e. world building. How much of it will end up in the story? I’ll know when I write more of the story I guess.

This morning I’m writing to y’all.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features a meeting on the road, travelers exchanging stories and giving directions.

This design can be found:
On a mug in my Zazzle store
On a variety of schtuff in my Redbubble store

Mighty Nizz

The last page of the first Mighty Nizz comic posted on Wednesday. Below is what the art looked like when I scanned it into Photoshop. Go here to see what the final art looks like.

I’m currently inking the next Nizz story. It’s eighteen pages. I work on art in the evenings after work and as I have time on the days that the post office isn’t using my body to shlep around mail. I’m expecting to be able to post the first page on February 1st. I prefer to have the whole story finished before I show off any of it.

Thank you for reading. The nights are getting longer. Stay warm. Have some hot chocolate. Or eggnog. Toast to the good days and laugh at the bad.

See you in seven!

February the 8th, 2019

Perhaps time travel would create paradoxes. Perhaps it’s impossible. Perhaps one could never actually travel back in time in ones own universe. Perhaps we could only visit so-called “alternate” universes. Perhaps people time travel on a regular basis and we just never know about it.

Happy Birthday to:
Ellen Robinson
Joshua Morris

Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole – Black and White

FrankensteinEarthCoreBW

One of my favorite Frankenstein sequels is the short story “Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole” by Howard Waldrop and Steve Utley. It picks up where the novel left off with Frankenstein’s Monster wandering across the polar ice cap. He has discovered that Frankenstein made him too well – the ice and cold won’t kill him. He doesn’t want to try drowning himself – it might not work. So he keeps walking – right into the northern opening to the hollow earth.

He makes his way through the Earth encountering all manner of monsters, beasts and weirder things, conquers kingdoms, finds love, and sows fear and destruction in his path. Eventually he comes out at the South Pole. I liked the story so much that I bought the book Custer’s Last Jump just so that I wouldn’t have to check it out of the library the next time I wanted to read it. One of these days I’ll have to get around to reading the other stories that keep it company.

Reconciling Lost Worlds

When I was a kid, dinosaurs were believed to be, basically, giant, mostly slow moving lizards who lived in hot swampy jungles. The dinosaurs that appeared in fiction and films reflected that understanding. Some versions moved faster than others. Sometimes humans encountered these creatures by going back in time but, in the versions I’m currently considering, people discovered them in lost worlds – places on Earth where the beasts had been isolated and somehow avoided the changes that time and evolution forced on the rest of the planet.

The Valley of Gwangi. Maple White Land. The Center of the Earth. The Savage Land. Pellucidar. Pal-ul-don. Caprona. The Land Unknown. Skull Island. Loch Ness. When I was kid, there was a lot of debate about why the dinosaurs had gone extinct. Maybe mammals ate too many of their eggs. Maybe they were too dumb. Maybe the world got too cold. For whatever reason, they ceased to exist. Except. Somehow there were places in the world where dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles still fought and survived.

Decades later, in 2015, the understanding of dinosaurs has evolved and improved. We know that they were warm blooded and lived in many types of environments. Many of them had feathers. Most of the creatures that we think of as dinosaurs (or pterosaurs or marine reptiles) were no more “reptiles” than mammals are reptiles. Snakes, lizards, turtles, crocodiles and alligators – those are reptiles. Dinosaurs (and pterosaurs and, probably, marine reptiles) were something else.

About 60 million years ago an asteroid collided with the Earth in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. That’s the current scientific consensus.The aftermath of that collision wiped out most of the “higher” species of life including dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine “reptiles”. The creatures that went extinct, had they somehow survived in little Lost Worlds, would have been strange and foreign beasts to Verne and O’Brien, Burroughs and Harryhausen, Doyle and all the other authors and film makers who conjured up still extant versions of prehistoric lands.

I still love the lost worlds that I read about in books and saw in movies. I’m delighted by all the new information that has been discovered about dinosaurs since I was a kid. It’s a little weird to think of a tyrannosaur as (sort of) a giant flightless bird (or a pigeon as small type of dinosaur) but I can roll with that. I understand that the likelihood of entire ecosystems surviving unchanged for tens of millions of years is … ridiculous. Yes, there are some species that have adapted to the changing world with changing much themselves. But those are individual species. There are no lone islands, inaccessible plateaus or valleys that sport ecosystems where time has stood still. Isolation tends to make ecosystems weirder and more unique rather than keep them in their pre-isolated state.

But I’m a nerd and I want my Lost Worlds. And fiction is malleable in ways the real world is not. How can one explain the existence of these Lost Worlds when actual dinosaurs were not slow moving reptiles and, even if they were, they couldn’t have survived unchanged for 60 million years?

That’s easy. Dinosaurs, my beloved new feathery beasts, are long gone. That asteroid did them in. The creatures in the Lost Worlds really are (sometimes, except when in pursuit of a novel human morsel) slow moving reptiles … who evolved in isolation along parallel paths as the original dinosaurs so that, while they resemble the originals, they are their own things.

The Valley of Gwangi. Maple White Land. The Center of the Earth. The Savage Land. Pellucidar. Pal-ul-don. Caprona. The Land Unknown. Skull Island. Loch Ness. There’s no need to repopulate them with feathered foreigners. They were never lands that time forgot. Time ran at a different speed there and created places that we mistook for something ancient.