Alphadonjon: Q is for Queen Sonya the Huge

Okay, not only is my Donjon Alphabooks entry a few days late, but it's also kind of a cheat. I mean, Sonya the Huge really is the Queen of the goblins by the end of the first volume of Dungeon: Zenith, and we do see her in that role in half of the first volume of Dungeon: Monstres, but I mostly the other characters call her Sonya the Huge, and not Queen Sonya the Huge.

She's a giantess. That absurd balloon on her head is the crown of the Goblin King. Maybe I should have put her on a palanquin borne by a brace of little goblins—if nothing else, that would have given you a better sense of her scale—but then it would have taken another couple of days, I bet, to get her here on the blog.

Sonya's actually pretty fun to draw. Maybe that shouldn't surprise me, since she's pretty obviously a Trondheim design, and his characters are always fun to draw. And I think I must have been taking a page out of Rob Ullman's book when I worked out this pose, though as usual I think I lost something moving from the sketch to the finished version.

(What did I lose? A little assertiveness? A little sauciness? Some junk in the trunk?)

Next week: I have to cheat a little (more).

Alphabooksbeasts Bonus: K is for Kriss

This isn't my "real" Alphabooks submission. It's just a speedy doodle that I colored very quickly. Maybe you've seen these Monster "graphic novels" (albums, really) by my hero Lewis Trondheim.

I only have a couple of them, and I have to admit I've only glanced at them so far, but they look really fun. Monster Dinosaur, in particular, seems to have a kind of funky jam-comic quality to it, involving dinosaurs drawn by a host of French (and other?) alt-comics heroes. I can spot one, for example, by David B., and I think there's one by Craig Thompson, too.

Anyway, I don't know much, but I can tell you that the family's eponymous monster is named Kriss.

Also, he is totally fun to draw, like so many Trondheim creations.

Okay, hold on. Let me get the real entry online.

Alphadonjon: H is for Hyacinthe and Herbert

Here's the first of this week's Satisfactory-Comics Alphabooks:

With the letter H, in Donjon, you happen to get two of the series's main characters: Hyacinthe, known as "the Keeper" during the Dungeon's Zenith period—he owns and manages the titular Dungeon—is also the hero of Dungeon: the Early Years, wherein he goes from a naïve young student with romantic notions of derring-do to a savvy and jaded widower. Herbert of Craftiwich, on the other hand, is the protagonist of the Zenith and Parade stories, and a major character in the Twilight storyline as well.

During the Zenith / Parade segment, they know each other well, but I've drawn Hyacinthe here as a young man, probably before Herbert was even an egg, so this particular scene could never actually happen in Dungeon.

Hyacinthe's costume in this drawing is slightly different from the way he usually dresses once his studies are underway. In the city, he forms a secret identity ("The Nightshirt") under which to fight for justice (and woo a curvaceous snake-lady assassin), and his musketeer hat and sword really belong to that side of his personality, whereas the tunic is part of his daytime wardrobe. But I didn't want to draw him as The Nightshirt, because that would belong under N, right?

 You may be wondering why Herbert is merely carrying the Sword of Destiny, and seems to be threatening to pinch or flick any approaching enemies. Well, early in his carrying of the Sword, before he had done three great deeds of valor with his own hands, the Sword would not allow him to draw it, or to use any other weapons. Instead, he had to learn to fight with just sticks and feathers.

He gets to be quite good at them. And then, toward the end of the second volume of Zenith, he's reminded that, because he's a duck, his whole body is covered with feathers.

Alas, this talent only works against green creatures, but before long Herbert is more diversely competent (and better equipped) than we see him here. Eventually, the Sword even lets him draw it.

This drawing came together pretty easily. Originally I had thought about having the two heroes doing a sort of transgenerational fist-bump, but once I drew a doodle of it I realized that (a.) it would be hard to make it "read" clearly and (b.) posing the fist-bump would put them too far apart on the page for good drama.

So I opted for the comics cliché of heroes spotlighted against a wall. I promise I won't overuse this pose. It just seemed the best way to imply that they were both important and heroic.

Anyway, next week: A sexy cat-woman (hello, Google hits) and a sorweful scribe.

AlphaDonjon: A is for Alcibiades and Ababakar Octoflea

I'm hoping that I will be able to draw one entire Alphabooks theme from the collaborative Dungeon comics (Donjon in the original French) co-authored by Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar, and a bunch of other great French cartoonists.

If you've never read any Dungeon at all, you can get started here.

In the very first volume of the series—indeed, by page four—you will meet two relatively minor characters whose names start with A:

That's Alcibiades the Gnomonist there at the bottom, who can normally be found managing the network of crystal balls that the Dungeon employees use to communicate.

Attacking him is Ababakar Octoflea, Prince Without a Principality, Whose Sandals Stomp on the Tombs of Kings, bearer of the Sword of Destiny. He dies a brutal death on page five.

But his death opens the path of heroism that defines the life of one of the series's main characters, and because of the weird chronology of the Dungeon books, you can also meet Prince Ababakar Octoflea in the first volume of Dungeon Monstres.

Alphabeasts: C is for Clacking Spider

This week's "Alphabeasts" drawing comes from the world of Lewis Trondheim & Joann Sfar's Dungeon, one of my favorite comics.

I find the fun, on-the-fly feeling of Dungeon really inspiring, and I wish I had the time and the talent to come up with a similarly rich fantasy world on my own. We've made a few different tributes to Lewis Trondheim on the blog here over the years—here's one, here's another, and here's a third, from the oubapian pages of Elm City Jams #3—and I'm sure this won't be our last.



If it weren't for the complicated rules I set for myself in this project, I might have done a bermaw for last week's letter instead of a babel fish. Instead, I found myself scouring the various volumes of Dungeon for a different creature that was definitely not sentient. (Most of the creatures in Dungeon seem to be persons, or else they aren't named.)

But Marvin the Dragon gets menaced by clacking spiders partway through the second (U.S.) volume of Dungeon: Zenith. If you've never read any of these fun books, though, the place to start is with Duck Heart, Zenith's first volume.

(The chronology of the books is complicated.)



It's right after this moment that Marvin delivers the first "TONG DEUM" fiery-acid dragon-breath spew of the series. Dang, I love Dungeon.

Now, will you help me decide what to draw next week? I know which universe to use, but I have two options, equally fun to draw, within that universe. What do you think? (Voting will be open until next Friday.)

What beast should I draw for the letter D?

Doodle Penance: "one adaptation of our critter"

This week's "Doodle Penance" comes from a googler who wanted to see "one adaptation of our critter."

I thought, "That seems like a very specific request. Only one adaptation? I guess I should pick the most important one." Of course, I was wrong in my initial understanding of the search, but before I get to the right results, let me show you what I came up with before I realized my error.

Have a look at this repugnant and disgusting extraterrestrial monster, previously seen in Lewis Trondheim's uncanny and upsetting A.L.I.E.E.E.N.



You can also take this abhorrent little critter for a walk in a game on Lewis Trondheim's website. (Trondheim's site is in French, naturally, but you really don't have to read it fluently in order to complete the game.)

Well, if you look closely at this despicable monster, you will see that it's mostly head and mouth: there's not a lot of room in that body for internal organs. Here, let's have a look inside.



(You can click to enlarge, if you like to look at bigger pictures of repugnant creatures.*)

Notice how this critter's guts are all scrunched up and packed together at the back of the balloon that is its body. There's not a lot of room for digesting back there, and yet the critter lives on some pretty indigestible stuff. That's why this species has developed an inter-dimensional intestinal shunt sphincter, which is pictured in the blowup of the diagram. These nasty little monsters do most of their digesting in the Negative Zone, the Phantom Zone, or some other alternate dimension.

It's a handy adaptation for these little alien vermin, but believe me, if you accidentally reverse the transport polarity of that sphincter, you'll be in for a nasty surprise.

... Anyway, that's what I originally thought our Google-searcher was looking for. But then I realized there might be a better explanation for the unusual specificity of the request. That's because I remembered about Our Critter, a little-known sentimental novel from late nineteenth-century Appalachia. (It's out of print now, so I can't link to it on Amazon.)

I did a little internet research of my own, and discovered that Our Critter has in fact been adapted in several forms in the twentieth century. There's a rollicking Tin Pan Alley ballad that tells the story, an early silent film that shows some of the climactic scenes, and a stage melodrama that apparently adds a new star-crossed romance subplot for the critter. I hear there was even a novelization of the melodrama. And of course Jon Lewis has been working on a comics version of Our Critter for six or seven years now.

The only adaptation I could find an image for, however, was a children's musical, apparently based mainly on the Tin Pan Alley ballad. It's commonly performed in rural elementary schools.



Mike, what did you come up with?

—Well, Isaac, I usually learn something from your contributions to "Doodle Penance," and today is no exception. I'll have to keep an eye out for other Our Critter ephemera!

But since I was ignorant of the Our Critter phenomenon, I assumed the searcher was interested in one of our critters—yours and mine—from the motley menagerie of the Satisfactory Comics line. And after the Darwinian discussions of two weeks ago, I assumed that "adaptation" was indeed to be taken in that A.L.I.E.E.E.N.ian sense, as referring to a biological change to help the critter get along better in its circumstances.

And with that in mind, I thought that perhaps the best such adaptation was the opposable thumb—or, as modeled here by the marsupial Walter from Satisfactory Comics #4, the opossum-ble thumb:
With his opposable thumb, Walter can both grasp the handle of his suitcase and make the hitchhiker's signal for passing cars on the roadside. These skills may help him avoid the all-too-common fate of so many of his possum kindred on our nation's highways.

A less successful adaptation can be seen in the jumbled-up features of this toucanagram from Satisfactory Comics #1:
Apparently, this critter wanted to emulate the ability of bats to dangle from their perches, but instead of just learning to live upside-down it shifted its feet to the top of its head—awkward! As if that weren't bad enough, it turns out that bats are xenophobes, so whenever the toucanagram seeks out a likely cave it gets shooed away by the crass chiropterans, having to settle for a perch on the underside of a tree branch, where it dangles like a sad fruit. Perhaps the poor critter needs to take a walk with the abhorrent little critter on Trondheim's website!


*By the way: props to Ben Towle, Adam Koford, and (through Ben) Les McClaine, for tips on making pseudo-Benday dots with Photoshop, or "How to Color Like a Little Old Lady in Bridgeport."

Special Doodle Penance Double: "Hezekiah Sugata" and "Isaac Trondheim"

This week we've got a special double Doodle Penance, because we couldn't make up our minds about which of this week's search requests was the most urgent.

Someone came to the site looking for "Hezekiah Sugata," who is (as I'm sure you know) the hillbilly shogun featured in the second issue of Elm City Jams.

Someone else came to the site looking for "isaac trondheim," which I can only assume meant they wanted a picture of me drawn in the style of one of my favorite cartoonists, Lewis Trondheim, the French super-genius behind Mister O,
Little Nothings,
Lapinot,
Dungeon,
and about ten thousand other awesome comics.

Well, we decided to do both.



What I want to know is why it looks like Hezekiah Sugata is hovering, Matrix-style, in that doodle, instead of leaping through the air. What did I do wrong? Please address this in the comments.

Mike, your doodle?

...Isaac, here 'tis, below. You will note that I chose to draw you much as Trondheim draws himself, only you've got glasses more like your own. And, oops, I forgot you have a beard nowadays (because I've hardly ever cartooned you with a beard). But then a beard might look weird on a bird. Anyway, here's the full duel between Hezekiah Sugata and Isaac Trondheim, drawn à la manière de Lone Wolf & Cub (I wish):
I'm sure it comes as a relief to see that your cartoon double has managed to survive an assault from one of your own cartoon creations!*

*Full props as due: Tom O'Donnell came up with the name "Hezekiah Sugata, Hillbilly Shogun," but Isaac first drew the character. Incidentally, we were honored to have Hezekiah featured on Chris Sims's Invincible Super-Blog in his review of Elm City Jams #2. Also incidentally, I alluded to the weaponry of Lone Wolf and Cub in my lone panel of that ECJ strip:
And yes, he's about to assail an outhouse there. If you need to know more, consult Elm City Jams #2!

Lewis Trondheim's Diablotus (1995)

So, three weeks ago I was in Paris for Easter weekend (though strictly speaking I went for Purim), and while there a friend of a friend directed me to a terrific comics shop near the Bastille called OpéraBD. Please, if you are in Paris and you enjoy comics, go to this store. They're open 'til midnight seven days a week, the staff are friendly, and they have ways of emptying your wallet. Just look what they did to me:

Okay, to be fair: not all of these books and comics were purchased at OpéraBD, though I probably could have found most of them there; and to defend myself: they're not all for me! My lovely wife personally chose about a third of these items, and a few are intended as gifts. But all are fair game for blogging comment, and I'd like to say a few words about the tiniest comic of the lot, which I just put in the mail to Isaac as a present (sorry for the spoiler, Kaiser, but it's for the cause!).

The comic in question is a 22-page story from the prolific master of modern BD, Lewis Trondheim, and it's the tale of a little demon whose name is probably the same as the title:

Visually, it's drawn in much the same style as Le Pays des trois sourires (The Country of the Three Smiles), possibly my favorite Trondheim comic, which employs spare but clean black-and-white doodles and which likewise features the occasional walking skeleton. Unlike Le Pays des trois sourires but like Mister O (also possibly my favorite Trondheim comic), Diablotus is a wordless pantomime. Unlike either of those works, which are formally quite constrained (Le Pays reads like one hundred episodes of a daily comic strip, Mister O adheres to a rigid many-panel grid for a series of single-page gags), Diablotus unfolds like an improvisation, one weird thing after another. It's not entirely devoid of plot, inasmuch as certain strands of incident get wound back into the thread of the story after being set aside for a while, but mostly Diablotus is a kind of comic bagatelle, a brief exercise in invention and style that probably shouldn't be asked to bear too much interpretive weight. Take, for example, this two-page sequence (you'll want to click to enlarge, but take care not to read across the whole page by mistake):

Now, if I wanted to get all "lit crit" about it, I could say something about how the dealing out of punishment in this work inevitably implicates both would-be punisher and would-be victim in an exchange of roles and suffering, and I could make a lot of hay out of the way identities are exchanged and reshaped as characters literally try on different skins or resculpt their familiar faces (as at the end of this sequence). But, you know, that kind of reading just doesn't seem suitably playful for a work as gleefully violent and innocent of consequence as this one. Even when ghosts eat each other in this comic, it's good more for a laugh than a meditation on mortality. At least I hope Isaac laughs when he finally gets to read his copy.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to see a single-page, doodly pantomime strip that shows Isaac and me at our most Trondheim-like, please check out "Because of This, I Cannot Love" in Elm City Jams #3 (the strip is included at that link). And if you want to see the sorts of demons we've turned out on occasion, Demonstration also is but a click away...