The figure with the skeleton arm was an exercise in drawing something weird. While it may seem like most of what I draw is weird, weird is a relative thing. I don’t think most of what I draw is weird. Something becomes weird when it surprises me in odd ways. It’s a challenge to draw (or write or sculpt or …) something that surprises the artist doing the drawing. I can’t succeed at it that often. I have to both be drawing fairly well and relaxed enough to just draw something without having a mental picture of how it will turn out.

To the right of the figure is King Roach getting ready to toss a car at something.

Along the bottom of the page is some poor schmuck caught between a shoggoth and a giant Deep One. Sucks to be him.

Two members of the Winter Company – a male spider person (at the top) and a female spider person (at the bottom). However they became spider people I doubt if they did it the same way. They obviously aren’t the same species – very different morphologies.

The figure here is an interpretation of Tarzan. I read a few Tarzan novels when I was a kid and enjoyed them but I’ve never been a huge fan. I picked up the entire Tarzan series very cheap when I was at Half Price Books. One of these days I’ll get around to reading them.

The head with the long hair also belongs to Tarzan. Despite his super strength and skills I figure he’s had the chance to pick up a few scars in his life.

The fuzzy shape to the left of Tarzan is probably a shoggoth.

The head at the bottom is the Wizard of Oz. I’m not sure who the other old guy is. Maybe the Wizard if he didn’t have fairy magic keeping him from aging?

I missed posting yesterday. Nothing drastic happened. I just didn’t make it to the computer.

The featured creature in this image is the lemur sorceror from my re-imagined Brute storyline.

I’m not sure what Freakshow refers to. It was either a name I was considering for the Winter Company or I was enjoying playing around with text.

More Winter Company sketches. One might think that with all the pages dedicated to these characters that they held a more solid place in my imagination. Oddly though, they’ve mostly been background; not protagonists but characters intended to show up to make the protagonist’s life more interesting.

At the top is a golem.

At the bottom is Archie, the manticore. He’s the only one of the company besides Henry (Frankenstein’s monster) that I gave a name to. For some reason I’m very fond of him. He always seems so cheerful.

More members of the Winter Company.

More sketches of the Winter Company from my 2000 sketchbook. I hadn’t actually read the novel Frankenstein when I did these. I’m sure I’d read Shelly’s description of the creature since this version of him is basically how I’d draw him today.

The Winter Company is a band of monsters living on the outskirts of human society. Many of them used to see humans as prey (or at least as The Enemy) but in order to become part of the Company they have to agree to leave humans alone. The monsters are a variety of creatures from natural freaks to supernature horrors. They are led by Frankenstein’s monster.

I did a portrait of the Company in my Epilogue.net gallery. I’d include a link to the specific image but I don’t seem to be able to access Epilogue today.

Back in the mid-nineties, Jordan Bojar, who had formerly published Misspent Youths, talked to me about his interest in reviving the Atlas characters for a new publisher. He asked if I’d be interested in writing any of the new series. Rather predictably I was most attracted to Atlas’s various monster characters.

There were a couple of characters that I developed fairly extensive new stories for, one’s different enough from the originals that I’d consider them new characters. This character started out as The Brute, a giant blue caveman revived from suspended animation. The original version just grunted and rampaged. This version, revisited here in my 2000 sketchbook, was a giant barbarian warrior from a prehuman, previously unknown civilization. He was revised along with his arch-enemy, an intelligent evolved lemur sorceror.

A version of the Burrabb priest. He’s obviously stockier now but that’s more because I’d learned to draw mass in the years since the first drawing. He’s still got the pointed ears and single nostrils of the original design. The priests of his religion cut off their horns to symbolize their commitment to peace and to indicate that they aren’t available for mating. (The both Burrabb sexes grow horns when they are sexually mature.) The chain is a symbol of devotion to his diety.

(As I’ve mentioned before “he” isn’t exactly an accurate pronoun. Despite being a two sexed species the Burrabb sexes share the procreative process differently than we terrans do.)