Even Monsters Have Mothers – B&W

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When I was a kid I wanted to be a giant monster. I wasn’t a dumb kid. I knew that I couldn’t actually become a giant monster. Not only was I generally the wrong species I knew enough about the square cube law to understand that really giant monsters were impossible. I could, however, grow up to be a giant monster actor. That was a job that a human being could have.

Except.

Most movies of the movies that I saw that featured giant monsters (at least the type that required humans to wear monster suits) seemed to be made in Japan. Only a very few got made in English speaking countries. And none in America.

So I had to pursue other career opportunities.

GORGO was one of the few giant monster movies made in an English speaking country that used a human actor to play the monster. Mick Dillon had that role. He seems to have mostly worked as a stunt double and wasn’t very tall – he played jockeys in more than one movie. Cheers Mick!

Killer Robots, Always a Bad Idea – B&W

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SearchPartyBW

I’m not worried about machines gaining sentience and then deciding to wipe out humanity. Maybe if machines could think they’d decide that we should be exterminated. Or ruthlessly dominated. Maybe they would have other ideas. We won’t know until it happens.

I’m more worried about programming machines to act as soldiers or as law enforcement. Programming has limitations and those limitations will get innocent people killed. The excuse for the tragedy will be, “We couldn’t have foreseen … “

Singing for Shub Niggurath – B&W

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ShubNiggurathBW

Lovecraft described some of his creations in great detail. Others are described in ways that are give the reader a vague sense of the thing and leave the specifics to his/her imagination. And others are left as vague eldritch monstrosities, barely comprehensible to the human mind. Shub Niggurath is one of those. So she (it) can be depicted however seems most appropriate.

I did a simple version of this illustration last October for the Drawlloween/Inktober challenge. I liked the results so much that it seemed worth trying again.

The Ugly Dog Sees All of You and Understands – B&W

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UglyDogBW

This is the Ugly Dog of Heaven. He made his first appearance in a minicomic I did with my brother, Glenn, back in 1989. Glenn wrote it, I drew it. That minicomic got reprinted in The Treasury of Mini Comics, volume 1. Most flatteringly, the publisher used a image of him on the spine of the book. UglyDogBookSpine

Glenn later wrote him into segments of his thousand experiment on his Lovesettlement blog: each day for a thousand days he wrote a post of 100 words. If he didn’t finish a sentence one day he’d carry it on to the next. 100 words a day for a thousand days resulted in a 100,000 word stream of consciousness ramble. Is it a novel? An epic prose poem? An incantation to summon strange gods? Yes.

Tentaclesaurus Rex – B&W

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TentacleRexBW

I’ve spent some time over the last four years trying to figure out a graphic novel project that a writer friend and I could collaborate on. I like his writing. He likes my illustration. We never did find a story that we both were willing to invest the time and money to take to completion.

At one point, while working out a possible scene in a possible plot, he asked whether I wanted the protagonist to battle a tyrannosaurus rex or a giant squid. My first thought was “Why not both?” but I think I told him that I preferred a tyrannosaur.

The “Why not both?” thought stuck with me and the “both” element had me decide to combine the two creatures into one. Sorta.

Chaugnar Faugn – Color

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Chaugnar Faugn Color

“Words could not adequately convey the repulsiveness of the thing. It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed, its resemblance to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which intertwined and interlocked at the base of the statue, were as translucent as rock crystal.”

–Frank Belknap Long, “The Horror From the Hills“