A door into the past? Or an alternate timeline? Or another dimension? You decide!

In the US, at least these days, the villain type most likely to carry any sort of series is the serial killer. They usually aren’t sophisticated sorts. Often they are inbred country folk, low in intelligence, freakish in appearance and hard to kill. If a killer isn’t a shunned outsider then he’s (and they’re almost always hes) generally insane.

I’ve been trying to encompass as many flavors of the “adventure” genre with my illustrations for the BRP Manual. One flavor that seems more popular in Europe than here in the States is the villain as protagonist represented by such fellows as Fantomas, Diabolik and Kriminal. Who doesn’t love a good villain?

I’ve just recently read Edgington and D’Israeli’s War of the Worlds trilogy (War of the Worlds, Scarlet Traces, Scarlet Traces: The Great Game – highly recommended!) so alien invaders are on my mind. Tripod war machines have burned themselves into my imagination since I was a kid and read John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy.

I have no idea what inspired this illustration.

Nope. Can’t think of anything. Must have come to me as divine inspiration.

Yup.

I love giant monsters. I’m less interested in giant robots. It’s not that I dislike them. I just have more of an affinity for the organic. Drawing machines takes more effort and thought for me than drawing trees and animals. So this drawing was more work than many of the others.

I doubt if my style looks anything like his but I have to credit Gil Kane for this one. Kane was the master of dynamic-punch-that-knocks-a-guy-across-the-room-and-into-your-face shot. Seeing that shot in dozens of comics while growing up burned it into my brain. The speed lines (that don’t really show up in this scan) come courtesy of all the manga that have come in recent years.

Back in 1991 I wrote the outline and first couple of issues of an adventure comic titled WEIRD Knights. It featured a Mission Impossible type group that dealt with supernatural/weird science menaces. The group’s leader would choose her team based on what sort of threat they were facing. Pia Guerra drew at least the first issue. I forget how far she got on the second. It doesn’t matter much since none of the work ever saw print. The company that contracted the work shut down.

The characters still live in my imagination. Now some of them will get to see print.

I’m trying to touch all the adventure genres in my illustrations for this book. Can’t forget the jungle goddess now can we?

I keep the copyrights on the illustrations I do for Chaosium. Some of the characters appearing in the pieces for the Basic Roleplaying Manual are ones I might use in future projects. I posted a version of the Shepherd a while back. The other fellow is the Bone Ghost, one of those obsessed dark avenger types that have populated superhero (underwear pervert) comics on a regular basis in the last couple of decades. I haven’t actually settled on a name for the character. Today he’s the Bone Ghost, tomorrow he might be the Revenge, Ragged Justice the day after. Nothing has stuck yet.