King Roach was supposed to fight a variety of monsters from small ones (a psychotic little girl with enormous telekinetic power) to Godzilla sized ones. Most of his foes were in the more managable 15 to 30 foot tall level – basically the size of the original King Kong. A few of those were other kids who’d been give the ability to turn into monsters themselves.

This creature was a teenage girl from an bad home in her premonster state.

I debated whether to post some of the next few sketches. They’re really sketchy sketches. I try to post art here that doesn’t take a lot of head scratching to figure out what’s in the image. They’re from my end of ’99, beginning of ’00 sketchbook and many of them deal with the development of the character of King Roach.

King Who?

Yes, another unpublished, in development comic series. You may have noticed how fond I am of monsters. King Roach is an attempt to develop a series that features lots of monsters, particularly giant monsters – monsters that cause lots of property damage just by moseying down the street.

I wanted a kid to be the hero. But I didn’t want him to be standing on the sidelines cheering on his pet monster/robot/superhero, while said pet actually fought the other monsters. I wanted him to be active and involved. So, obviously, he should be one of the monsters. Obvious to me but apparently obvious to no one else. I can’t think of a giant monster story that has the featured kid turning into one of the monsters. The closest we seem to get are stories of kids piloting giant robots who fight monsters.

So, this page features early sketches of our hero both as a human and in monster form at the bottom of the page. He’s the humanoid monster, not the dinosauroid. Not sure who the little girl at the top of the page is supposed to be. She looks like one of the pharmacist’s kids.

I think most of us can thank God that we aren’t hideous radioactive mutants like this fellow here. He’s a sketch of the mutant from The Day the World Ended. Of course, if you can’t thank God that you’re not a hideous radioactive mutant you either don’t believe in God (and why should you?) or you’re a real weirdo (yay!). Either way, happy American Thanksgiving. May you eat well, enjoy the company of friends and family and get a good nap.

I’d planned to be productive. I’d start sketching something out. I’d decide it looked like crap. I’d sketch something else. Crap. Sketch again. More crap. I finally did this Kachinaish fellow, decided that he wasn’t that bad and gave up drawing for the day.

I have not read any of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels. What I know about them is mostly from the illustrations and paintings other artists have done. (I read every issue of the Marvel comics John Carter series. It made no lasting impression on me. I’d forgotten it existed until I saw some cover images on the web recently.) I’m sure I’ll get around to reading the novels eventually. Every time I do read a Burroughs novel I’m reminded what a lively storyteller he was.

I felt compelled to draw something Barsoomian one day. After a couple of stabs at sketching a thark I decided to do a Martian lion instead. I’m not really happy with the result. Not that I think it’s bad. I was just trying to do something specific in the inking process (bold clear lines) and the result wasn’t satisfying. To me.

There’s no story behind this one. He could be hero, villain or horror. He could be a she. I don’t know.

I’ve recently posted new color portraits on the Oz Squad Who’s Who page –
Button Bright
The Cowardly Lion
Nick Chopper
Some Orks
Polychrome
and the Wizard

These are the first portraits that are done straight color, no greytone work. These are also the last portraits I’m likely to post until I get an Oz Squad webpage set up and that’s really only in the vague thinking stage. At this point now I’ve got images and short bios of all the major players that I can write authoritatively about. Yes, there are some important characters that are missing. Some of them are dead in the Oz Squad world. Some have had major changes to their character or appearances since the original Baum novels and I don’t know enough about the history of those changes to write about them.

(some of) The Misspent Youths gang fifteen years later –

From left to right-

Top row –

Lili Veracruz, Moe, K.Z. O’Neil

Middle Row –

Trouble Coyote (not actually aged a day, I was tired and forgot what I was doing with the characters), Samuel (formerly Detritus), Buffy Crawfield
Bottom Row –

The guy from the fifth issue who wanted to kill everyone at Burger Bopper because his girlfriend was cheating on him, The remnants of the Pile, Treacher Murphy

More monster sketches.

On the left is the psycho girl monster from King Mantis. The sketchbook that features that series-in-development will start being posted next week so I’ll wait until then to say anything more.

On the right is a Frankenstein monster. I’ve developed this strange affection for Frankenstein monsters since I read the novel. Not sure why.

At the bottom is monster of indeterminate species. The image was sitting in my mind. My hands drew it. Don’t know what it is. It’s probably hungry though. Monsters usually are.

I think the name speaks for itself.