This is the bad brother. The one that eats people. He’s blue. Snow precedes him wherever he goes.
In the King Roach story they are ancient avatars of winter and summer who have gained physical form. King Roach teams with the summer (good) brother to defeat the winter (bad) brother.
Of the kaiju I considered “borrowing” for King Roach the Gargantuas are the only ones I thought of a King Roach specific story for. In their movie they were brothers (sort of). One was brown and “good” (he just hung out in the forest by himself) and the other was green and “bad” (he came to the city and ate people).
This is the good brother. If he were in color he would be brown.
I have not seen Varan. I think it’s available on DVD but I really only spend 5 or 6 hours a week watching movies and then it’s almost always with Nizzibet. She fails to appreciate the glory of giant monsters stomping on tiny cities. When I did this drawing in 2003 Youtube didn’t exist either. These days if I need to see a monster in action I can usually locate some footage there. So this is a version of Varan for the King Roach series that, like the version of Anguirus earlier this month, I’d likely never actually use in the King Mantis series.
Apparently I liked that creature on yesterday’s sketch page because here it is again.
Also on the page is Mara Winikat making faces. One of my practices is to run character through their emotional paces. I often present them expressing extreme emotions because
A) Extreme emotions are fun to draw
B) How the character expresses those emotions says a lot about the character. Some of the character that live in my head don’t exhibit emotions loudly. Others couldn’t be subtle to save their lives.
Hopefully by now King Roach is easy to identify. The rest of the creatures on the page are various possible adversaries. At the bottom, on the left is the freak creature. On the right is the samurai thing.
Not sure who the noseless guy is. I must have just been inventing him as I sketched since I can’t identify him. The KR adversaries that I’ve put thought in to are always recognizable to me when I see them again. I can’t say I remember the details of their stories but I do remember that they had stories.
This sketch was done after watching some weird kung fu movie with Derek. We were doing research for Mandate of Heaven, his kung fu RPG. I don’t remember what the movie was now. Mostly I remember how the demon villains would twist and change their forms when they revealed their demon selves. They didn’t just get big and ugly, they’d get weird and ugly. It was inspiring.
H.P. Lovecraft created the Elder Things in his short novel At the Mountains of Madness. They were/are an alien race that colonized the Earth millions of years before Man. Based on human interpretations of their hieroglyphs the Elder Things might have created life on this planet. They might even have evolved humanity as a slave species. While on Earth they co-existed (and warred) with other intelligent alien species. Eventually they fell into decline, eventually becoming almost extinct on this planet.
The Elder Things came from another world. They evolved somewhere, they had a native biosphere. These two critters are attempts to imagine what other creatures might have lived on that home world.
The portrait of the woman done in colored pencils is probably just me playing around with my tools. I don’t recognize her as a character in any stories.
The rest of the page is dedicated to sketches of one of the survivors of the empire I mentioned yesterday. A finished portrait can be found here.
Part of the background for the King Roach series (at least in the version in this 2003 sketchbook) is ancient, lost empire. History has forgotten it. It was powerful and, basically, fundamentally, corrupt and evil. It had the sort of advanced technology that looks like magic to pre-industrial cultures. Tiny pockets of tech staffed by former citizens of the empire (kept in stasis) lay hidden in unexplored pockets of the world. Woe to anyone who pokes about in those pockets.
Most of King Roaches adversaries are giant monsters. King Roach stands about 15 feet tall. His enemies range for slight shorter than that to much, much larger.
For the fun of it I cast versions of various movie monsters as King Roach opponents. This one is a version of Anguirus. Anguirus has the distinction of being Godzilla’s first sparring partner. He appeared in Godzilla Raids Again, the first sequel to the 1954 Godzilla. The figure at his feet is an “average” human male. Increase the figure in size by three and you get a rough guess as to how King Roach compares in size.
If I ever get around to doing the King Roach series I’m unlikely actually many movie analog monsters. They’ve already got their own movies. As much fun as I have drawing them I don’t really have any new stories to tell about most of them – “Giant monster appears and King Roach has to figure out how to make it go away without getting squished” – is good once. After a couple dozen times it would just be tedious.
