Take the chance. Reach out and touch one another. Metaphorically. Emotionally. Philosophically. Physically. Psychically.
Happy Birthday to:
Javier Gay Lorente
Tag Archives: The Heap
Three Children and It – Color
With the exception of the Heap itself I used most of the colors from the 2013 mock cover to color this illustration. I made the Heap a darker green.
Three Children and It – Black and White
The Heap was the first swamp monster to have its own regular series of stories. PS Publishing recently collected all those tales in three volumes under its Roy Thomas Presents series. There are a few good stories in the mix but they are rare and mostly in the last volume. I suspect that my lack of enthusiasm is more the result of when I started reading comics than the stories themselves. They were written during the so-called Golden Age of Comics when comics were expected to be read by children and comics creators were really still learning the form. During its day, The Heap was a rare comic that featured a hero monster. When I started reading comics in the 1970s, monsters were everywhere. Man-Thing and Swamp Thing had adventures much weirder (and longer and better written) than those of their four color ancestor.
Oh well, the Heap is immortal and its legend may yet surpass that of its descendants.
A couple of years ago I did a mock cover for a Heap comic. I had fun but I wasn’t satisfied with the results. So here’s another image using the same characters.
First Issue Special!
Back in 2013 I did a mock cover for the imaginary first issue of a Heap comic book. Since 2013 was the year of Daughter of Spiders I didn’t post the artwork here, only on my Facebook pages. Silly me. Time to fix that. Below are process steps for the cover.
Pencils:
Inks:
Flat colors:
Final colors:
Sketches Found While Looking For Other Things
Most of the drawings that I’ve posted this month were done in early 2015. Today’s entries are from (I think) 2013. All drawings are practice for the next one but I do some with a specific purpose. I’m not sure for what purpose these were done however. I found them in one of my computer files while looking for other images. I’m guessing that I was trying out a new pen. And, possibly, seeing how much I could improve in the inking process. 
Swamp Boys
And here I indulge my fondness for swamp monsters.
A Muck Thing
I have a fondness for certain specific types of monsters.
Giant Monsters. That is, any type of critter that’s 15 feet tall or taller. I’m not very discriminating about the bigger monsters. That size range covers everybody from the original King Kong to the Fifty Foot Woman to The Deadly Mantis to Godzilla. Screw the cube square law. I love over-sized monsters.
Fishman Monsters. The Monster of Piedras Blancas. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Humanoids from the Deep. The residents of Innsmouth. Any critter that’s an unholy cross between man and seafood makes me happy. (Except traditional mermaids. I’m not sure why. That top-half-human, bottom-half-fish arrangement just seems silly to me. I know that makes no sense.)
Frankensteins. My love for Frankenstein comes later than for the previous two categories. I had to read the novel before I really became interested. Since I’ve read a lot of sequels to/alternate versions of Mary Shelley’s novel and I’m working my way through various movie versions. I certainly have fun drawing versions of the creature.
Lovecraftian Things From Beyond. Not just the Cthulhu Mythos. Science fiction horror where the horror is a thing that exists outside human understanding? I’m not really sure how to describe it.
Sasquatches. I’d love it if there really is a Bigfoot, Yeti, Orang Pendak or other upright ape still wandering the earth. There aren’t a lot of good bigfoot movies but I’ve got a small library of entertaining novels and non-fiction books on the big fellow.
Muck/Swamp Monsters. Which finally brings me to the subject of this post. Fishmen and Sasquatches often hang out in swamps but they aren’t the same thing. A good swamp monster is at least part plant. There aren’t a lot of examples. Most of them are from comics. The Heap. Swamp Thing. Man-Thing. And … not a lot of other examples. In prose there’s Theodore Sturgeon’s It. In movies – bad adaptions of Swamp Thing and Man-Thing. There was a swamp monster in an episode of The Night Stalker.
I’m not really a plant person. I don’t have a green thumb. Give me a plant and I’ll show you a bunch of dead sticks in a pot a few weeks later.
I’ve never read any Heap stories. As far as I know there aren’t any collections of the old comics available.
I love the look of the Man-Thing but honestly I haven’t read many Man-Thing comics. The poor guy is mindless. It’s hard to root for him when you can’t even play fetch with him.
I read the original Swamp Thing series when I was a kid and a good chunk of the second series when it was being published. Those were good comics but it’s been a long time since I read any ongoing comic book series.
Yet I count Swamp Monsters among my favorite night bumping things. They’re green. They’re quiet. They usually don’t want to eat you. They like to play in the mud. They can’t drown. And they’re fun to draw.
