The thing on the right is one of the main villains from Slime God Summer: an extradimensional fiend who is attempting to escape exile in a pocket universe. The beefy types on the page are sketches for soldiers. King Roach ends up dealing with soldiers a lot. He’s a big monster who fights big monsters. Who does society usually send to fight big monsters? Soldiers of course! So King Roach is often on the receiving end of soldiers’ bullets.

This is the page that reminds me that I’d been thinking of including Slime God Summer into the King Roach series. Most of the character on the page are from King Roach. The four disreputable dudes along the right and bottom (ducktail, buzzcut and the two long hairs) are from SGS. They make the mistake of picking on Kid K’tu H’lu while he is in human guise. Given that the Kid’s human guise is an ugly fat kid I’m sure the bullies assumed he was their natural prey. Big mistake.

Kid K’thu H’lu is from the (of course, unfinished and, obviously, unpublished) story Slime God Summmer. Three adolescent boys summon up the infant godling and, as they say, hilarity ensues. I’m pretty sure that this sketch ended up in this sketchbook (1999) because I was considering making SGS an episode in the King Roach series. The Kid is the squirmy figure at the top of the page. The head below it is its mother.

This was the black and white art for our Christmas card design for 1999. The final design was in color. If I get a chance I’ll see if I can locate the final artwork somewhere in my backups.

A sketch of one of the (at least) seven illegent species on the planet Babble. This species is generally nomadic making yearly circuits across the great plains of Babble’s main northern continent.

Babble is so named because it’s a noisy planet. Much of the plant life has hollow parts that catch the planet’s constant wind and so rattle, whistle and moan.

In the top left corner is an evolve lemur.

In the top right is a rough sketch of an intelligent zero g crustacean.

At the bottom is a size comparison sketch of a six foot tall human and a /male and /female Burrabb. I haven’t altered the Burrabb body design much since I drew this sketch back in 1999. Most of the changes have been to the design of the head. The Burrabb are a two sexed species with one sex being substantially larger than the other. The Burrabb sexes don’t directly translate to human male and human female. The breeding process is rather different than ours. The social structure resembles what might develop if lions became civilized, a society in which group marriages are the biological norm. It’s not polygamy if everybody does it.

On the left side of the page is the head of a Blair as it ages. The Blair are huge space going wormlike aliens with a natural lifespan of thousands of years. In their youth the Blair are light blue, smooth and sort of chubby, almost cute. As they mature their color darkens to nearly black, their skin becomes leathery and their bodies develop corners and angles making them look rather dragonish.

On the right side, at the top, is a sketch of the head of a Gug.

Under that is a version of Cthulhu inspired by the Stephen Hickman sculpture. Hickman’s statue is one of my favorite depictions of the Great Old One. It’s not how I would draw the Big C myself these days but I’d certainly love to have one of the statues.

Most of the critters here are inspired by the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. The one exception is the beta-version Burrabb in the upper left corner. This was when I was just drawing them as sort of devil apes.

In the upper left is an attempt at drawing a serpent person. It’s somewhat modeled on the Dinosauroid, the intelligent evolved dinosaur prototype that got a lot of ink in the nineties.

In the middle left is a human on his way to becoming a ghoul.

In the middle left is a human on his way to becoming a deep one.

At the bottom is a Mi-Go, one of the Fungai from Yuggoth.

The two adults in the upper left are villainous military guys. You just know that if the military, any military, found out that there was a kid capable of turning into a giant bullet-proof monster living in their country they’d want to have some control over him. Unfortunately for Brian Daniels the bad military elements found him before the good ones did.

The pencil sketches are an attempt to design a giant moth monster that resembled Mothra but wasn’t Mothra. I thought it would be amusing to have analogs of all the main Japanese giant monsters make appearances in the King Roach series. The Mothra analog was to have vast wings made of glowing energy. The wings would both allow her to fly and would function as weapons.

The two inked figures at the bottom right are from the story Jeremy Loader Never Could Pick Up After Himself. The original story (written and inked by me, penciled by Pia Guerra) appeared in Asylum #1 back in the early nineties.

While I thought Pia did an excellent job illustrating the story I’d originally planned to draw it myself. Because of this the characters still live in my head in ways that characters created for collaborations usually don’t. The crazed postman in other story that Pia drew doesn’t live in my imagination. I created him knowing that Pia would be drawing him and so never formed any mental picture of him.