Monthly Archives: August 2007

It Conquered the World

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Paul Blaisdell was responsible for some very striking monster suits in a series of low budget monster movies in the fifties and sixties. Most of the suits are pretty goofy looking but that’s part of their charm. Blaisdell went that extra mile to create creatures that were unforgettable.

“Beulah”, the Venusian from It Conquered the World is a prime example of Blaisdell’s goofy imagination.

This drawing is one in my ongoing series of re-interpreting old b-movie monsters, combining what (little) I know of science and biology with the basic designs of the originals to make something new. With this one I went with the idea that Beulah was some sort of crustacean (those claws are suggestive of that) and this is the result.

The Other Master

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For the Mandate of Heaven kung fu dictionary I planned to have two characters demonstrating the moves. One was the male I’ve shown previously. Here are some of the work sketches as I tried to figure out what the female kung fu master would look like.

The Forest Brothers – The Good Brother

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Of the kaiju I considered “borrowing” for King Roach the Gargantuas are the only ones I thought of a King Roach specific story for. In their movie they were brothers (sort of). One was brown and “good” (he just hung out in the forest by himself) and the other was green and “bad” (he came to the city and ate people).

This is the good brother. If he were in color he would be brown.

Kinda Sorta Varan

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I have not seen Varan. I think it’s available on DVD but I really only spend 5 or 6 hours a week watching movies and then it’s almost always with Nizzibet. She fails to appreciate the glory of giant monsters stomping on tiny cities. When I did this drawing in 2003 Youtube didn’t exist either. These days if I need to see a monster in action I can usually locate some footage there. So this is a version of Varan for the King Roach series that, like the version of Anguirus earlier this month, I’d likely never actually use in the King Mantis series.

Mara and the Whatsit

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Apparently I liked that creature on yesterday’s sketch page because here it is again.

Also on the page is Mara Winikat making faces. One of my practices is to run character through their emotional paces. I often present them expressing extreme emotions because
A) Extreme emotions are fun to draw
B) How the character expresses those emotions says a lot about the character. Some of the character that live in my head don’t exhibit emotions loudly. Others couldn’t be subtle to save their lives.

King Roach Adversaries

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Hopefully by now King Roach is easy to identify. The rest of the creatures on the page are various possible adversaries. At the bottom, on the left is the freak creature. On the right is the samurai thing.

Not sure who the noseless guy is. I must have just been inventing him as I sketched since I can’t identify him. The KR adversaries that I’ve put thought in to are always recognizable to me when I see them again. I can’t say I remember the details of their stories but I do remember that they had stories.

Fucked Up

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This sketch was done after watching some weird kung fu movie with Derek. We were doing research for Mandate of Heaven, his kung fu RPG. I don’t remember what the movie was now. Mostly I remember how the demon villains would twist and change their forms when they revealed their demon selves. They didn’t just get big and ugly, they’d get weird and ugly. It was inspiring.

Elder Thing Biosphere

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H.P. Lovecraft created the Elder Things in his short novel At the Mountains of Madness. They were/are an alien race that colonized the Earth millions of years before Man. Based on human interpretations of their hieroglyphs the Elder Things might have created life on this planet. They might even have evolved humanity as a slave species. While on Earth they co-existed (and warred) with other intelligent alien species. Eventually they fell into decline, eventually becoming almost extinct on this planet.

The Elder Things came from another world. They evolved somewhere, they had a native biosphere. These two critters are attempts to imagine what other creatures might have lived on that home world.