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.

And this is where I got a basic design for King Roach’s head that worked for me. Round and streamlined, insectlike but with human attributes. The antennae aren’t in their final place and I’m still not sure if the character has hair or not but I’ve been happy with this design for years now. I wonder when I’ll make time to do the series?

The spikey face in the upper right is the “evil twin” of King Roach. Because all heroes have evil twins. It’s the rule book.

“Soylent Black” in the upper left? Just another story about extreme civil disobedience. Or rather, idea for a story. You may have noticed that I have a lot of those.

It’s Dave from Bugfuck Palace. He’s looking kind of thin and haunted in this sketch. Don’t know why.

Today’s page has only an unfinished sketch of KR’s head. It’s still not the final design. Down the left side are the Jade Buddha, Dave and Sister D from Bugfuck Palace. On the right side are two characters that I don’t recognize (and so are probably just poor annonymous practice figure), the Buddha’s backside and then a sketch of Dave.

When I first imagined the King Roach series I was thinking of serializing it as a webcomic. So I looked around to see if there was already a comic (or a comic character) called King Roach. Turned out that there was. At the time there was even a website that featured the comic. Rather than get attached to the name I started thinking of something else. It took a while but I came up with another name that I like quite a bit better. I’m keeping that name to myself for now and continue to refer to the character as King Roach. That other King Roach doesn’t appear to be active at the moment. Someone still holds the www.kingroach.com registration but there’s nothing there right now.

More work hammering King Roach’s head into shape. The versions here are rounder, more streamlined – friendlier.

The sketches here that don’t look like KR represent various potential adversaries.