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.
On the left we have King Roach in his what is essentially his final design. He’s about 15 feet tall. In the middle is an “average” six foot tall human. I’m not sure what the last figure is. It looks like some sort of giant apeman. The nose is wrong for it to be a gorilla though the posture is similar to the original stop motion King Kong. It’s about the right size too. During the island scenes Kong is 18 feet tall. He becomes 24 feet tall once he’s in New York. Denham must have fed him a lot of vitamins on that trip from the island to the city.
More sketches of the King Roach kids. Brian Daniels, our hero, is the inked drawing at the bottom.
Busy day for me today – running errands, taking a friend to the airport, seeing our nephew for his birthday. And it’s raining. Yay rain!
Happy Friday everyone! Life on my side of the screen has been pretty lively. The week’s just flown by. I wish my brain were awake enough to let me talk about current projects.
But I’m just sitting here staring at the screen. I start to write a sentence and then change my mind. Start again and then erase it. So I’ll just wish you a good weekend and go figure out something to have for breakfast.
From the ’99/’00 sketchbook – The guy with the long hair is Dave from Bugfuck Palace. The other figure is one of King Roach’s potential adversaries.
