Back in 2001, when I was working out the major species in the Sentient 39 universe I ran into a major stumbling block – the limits of my own imagination. And my desire to have the different alien species actually be different. I didn’t want to just toss up intelligent lizard and cats and just-like-humans except for the shapes of their ears and eyebrows. The more I’ve read about life on this planet the more I’m convinced that life on other worlds is going to diverse and strange and not simply terran life with different colors and slightly mixed up parts.
So, faced with the limits of my imagination I did what authors and artists have done since man started telling stories – I stole from another author. In this case I swiped the Mi-Go and the Elder Things from HP Lovecraft. In Lovecraft’s stories these creatures were supposed have existed for millions of years and spread their empires across the galaxy. They seemed like a good fit and they are in the public domain. I didn’t get the Elder Thing illustration past a very rough sketch. This is a Mi-Go, one of the so-called Fungi from Yuggoth.
For some reason I always imagined that MiGo work like Cordyceps. There’s a non-sentient bug/crustacean/thing where they live, and they grow into it, burst through part of the shell, and take over.
That’s a cool idea! Will we be seeing the MiGo in your comic?
The long-term plot is actually going to deal with protomatter and MiGo experiments, so definitely; one will show up as a regular character in Chapter 11, tentatively titled “The Roommate Out of Space.”