Category Archives: sketchbook

Mara Practices the Horse

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It’s the clash of two unrelated projects!

On the right is the male figure for the kung fu dictionary for Mandate of Heaven

On the left is Mara Winikat, King Roach’s alter ego. Wait, you ask, wasn’t Brian Daniels King Roach’s alter ego? Yes he was. And he still is actually. It’s more complicated than I want to get into at the moment. Suffice to say, there’s more than one kid who turns into a giant monster. And while I like Brian he’s not the greatest protagonist. He’s kind of complainy and whiny and spends a lot of time wishing that things would turn out his way. In that way he’s uncomfortably close to … me as a kid. (Probably me as an adult. I’ll leave that to others to determine.)

Sigh.

NPCs

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On the right we have Professor Grant Emerson. The professor is an NPC (non player character) who writes scientific articles on weird phenomena for The Black Seal. Graeme Price writes the actual articles.

On the right is … I forget what her name is. She was to be an NPC who wrote about weird phenomena from a scholarly perspective. She was a librarian with access to the vast resources of the British Library (although probably not to the Forbidden Books, the hideous tomes that the Library doesn’t admit to owning and never loans out). Unlike Professor Emerson she was to be a house name at the Seal and could have her articles written by anyone with an inclination.

Once I’d done these portraits I was inspired to do portraits of all the Seal’s contributors as a way of blurring that line between reality and fiction. Emerson and the Librarian were to have their portraits and bios on the contributors’ page along with all the rest of us.

So far the Librarian’s skills have gone untapped.

Weird Things

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Except for the somewhat vicious version of the Lizard on the right none of these beings are attached to any particular project. Practice, practice.

The Thinker and the Lizard

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I kept failing to get the Lizard to look right. I didn’t want him to look too human, like a guy in lizard suit; but when I made him look really lizardy he looked sort of silly. Which, considering that I was thinking of the miniseries as a comedy, probably would have been okay.

The guy with the serious brow and the swept back hair is the Mad Thinker. Huh. I just read the Wikipedia article on him on the other end of that link. Sounds like he would have worked well in that Dragon Man/Girl miniseries.

The two figures at the bottom of the page aren’t attached to any particular project that I remember.

Horse with Character

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In order to do the diagrams for Mandate of Heaven’s kung fu dictionary I needed to create some characters. For projects that require multiple drawings of the same figure it helps me if that figure is an individual, if only to me. Otherwise I get bored and if I’m bored, drawing is no fun. Stories engage me. Individuals have stories. So I invented a couple of characters to demonstrate the different actions that would be in the dictionary. This was the male figure.

Plant Soldier

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I enjoy redesigning the monsters featured in old b-movies. I try to keep the creature’s basic design and add only what makes sense based on the story. In this case I was playing around with the featured thing in The Thing From Another World. It was a plant man that lived on blood. That’s an odd sort of biology. What sort of culture did it come from? What sort of environment?

A finished version of this creature can be found here.

Lizard and Son

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The second series idea was Lizard and Son. The Lizard is one of Spider-Man’s earliest villains. He’s a scientist who turns into a giant talking lizard whenever it’s least convenient. The idea was to have a miniseries in which Curt Connors (the Lizard) and Billy Connors (his teenage son) are trying to live quietly in the Pacific Northwest but their lives keep getting interrupted by various superheroes, supervillains and secret organizations. It would have been a basically light hearted series. In real life it would probably suck to have a father who regularly turns into a supervillain with a desire to destroy the human race. As much as I enjoy reading serious stories in which horrible things happen to the protagonists I’m not that driven to write such stories myself.

There are a number of sketches of the Lizard on the pages to follow. That’s because I kept failing to draw a version I liked. I still haven’t done one that I’m satisfied with.