Alphabooksbeasts: G is for Gurgi

I'm not so happy with this week's second Alphabooks entry. I have an old fondness for this character that probably dates back to fourth or fifth grade, but despite a lot of effort I wasn't able to get him to look right.

The problem for this week is a really hard one. The character you're looking at, Gurgi, appears in The Black Cauldron and the other Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, which I devoured when I was in elementary school, probably too young or naïve to understand everything in the books. I remember only a few little things about Gurgi—one scene where he ducks his head down below his shoulders trying to avoid the big evil bad guy; the fact that he's always hungry and unkempt—and I haven't read those books for more than thirty years.

I'm pretty sure that the editions I read had no illustrations, so I was trying to recreate a really dim memory of how I would imagine Gurgi while I was reading about him. If you do a little Google search for him, you'll see that the Disney movie has completely colonized the visual imaging of this character, even though Disney's version probably could not swing a shortsword.

So I started this business trying to draw a faint and distant memory of an imaginary person.

Some of those were pretty close, but I wasn't happy with any of them, because although they fit the descriptions I was reading of Gurgi, they really didn't look like much like my memory. I even went so far as to work up a complete inked drawing of that bugbeary version of the guy. Maybe in some ways this one's better than the one I colored.

I do like his ape feet, and his mild resemblance to Sir Paul McCartney, but I still don't think that's close to the way I was imagining Gurgi when I was reading about Taran all those years ago.

So, at like 3:00 AM, when I should have been coloring if I wasn't sleeping, I started doing new doodles. There's some improvement here, though the pose I settled on seems really stupid in retrospect. What's wrong with just having him sitting on the ground? And why did my finished version wind up looking so mean, when these ones are cute?

Well, if I had world enough and time, I'd try another run at the guy. I wish the ten-year-old version of me had left me some better notes.

Next week: I suppose it's a pun, from a book full of puns.

Alphadonjon: G is for Grogro and Gregor

This week's Dungeon entry in Alphabooks features a vampire and a monster, but I have to admit that I've already drawn a lot of scarier Dungeon characters.

I love these guys.

Grogro and Gregor are both denizens or employees of the dungeon. I don't think I've said anything yet about the economics of the Dungeon itself. Basically, it's a commercial enterprise: there are rumors of fantastic treasure inside, so adventurers arm themselves with their best gear and come from far and wide to raid the Dungeon. They almost all get killed eventually by the various monsters inside, and the adventurers' equipment is added to the hoard.

Gregor is one of the vampires who live in the dark chambers that not many other employees go to. (Yeah, that's what vampires look like in Donjon.) He appears in a few scenes in Dungeon Parade: Day of the Toads. Grogro is much more frequently seen, in nearly every one of the main-timeline books, and in fact he's the protagonist in the second story in Dungeon Monstres: Night of the Ladykiller.

I had a good time drawing this piece. Probably it helps that I am really fond of Grogro. He's a buffoon with a big appetite and a childlike demeanor, and he is one hundred percent fun to draw. He's been cropping up in my margins a lot this week.

I had all sorts of weird ideas for ways to pose the characters this week.

Eventually I just sort of settled on the idea that Grogro should be dancing. There's a great sequence in Night of the Ladykiller where Grogro winds up in an arena, fighting off a brace of gladiators with a broom and some flatulence, and I think some of the fun choreography in that sequence got me thinking about Grogro bumping butts with a vampire.

Next week: two of the most important characters in all of Dungeon.

Alphadonjon: D is for Delacour and Davraz

This week's Donjon entry for Alphabooks brings the last bearer of the Sword of Destiny that we'll see for a few letters, just in case you're tired of seeing that little red belt buckle. And in fact, after Ababakar's quick death, he's the only other wearer of the sword that we meet in while he's alive, other than Herbert the Duck, in the main timeline.

There's also a Red Guard assassin hanging out in the background this week. There's a snake under that cowl, I think, but we never see his face.

This week, D is for Delacour and Davraz.

I'm cheating a little, I guess, with Delacour's name (and initial), though that's what he's called in the Zenith stories that feature him. Really his name is William Delacour, so maybe I should have alphabetized him under W. If we were working with the French originals, he'd go under G for Guillaume. Or maybe under C for de la Cour? Anyway, this is where he seems to belong for me.

And let me tell you, he's a scoundrel in the most aggravating way. Delacour is self-satisfied, ornery, litigious, niggling, petty, selfish, cowardly, malicious, and manipulative. He's the last chicken you'd trust with anything.

Also, he has a detachable head.

The reason his head's detachable is revealed in the first volume of Monstres: the Sword of Destiny has one blade that kills, and another that cuts without wounding. When Ababakar Octoflea confronts Delacour to kill him for the Sword, Delacour offers to give it to him, to save his own life, but the Sword refuses. The only way to claim the Sword from its owner is if the owner has been beheaded.

So Delacour uses the sword to cut off his own head with the blade that doesn't wound. Ababakar walks off with the Sword, and aside from a need for a nice tight scarf Delacour is none the worse for the event.

Ohhh, what a bastard he is.

Initially I wanted him to look blithe, carefree, smug, and jaunty, and I tried a few different doodles hoping to catch that (and also show his head detaching).

Do you recognize my source?

It didn't really come across, did it? Probably because Leo doesn't have a completely detachable head.

Well, still:

Next week: well, probably some more poultry.

Alphabooksbeasts: C is for Caliban

I've been wrestling with drawing this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks character for decades, on and off. Probably if I sit down to draw him again next year, I'll come up with something entirely different. That's in part because there's no single right way to draw Shakespeare's Caliban.

We know these things about him:

• He's half-human, having been sired on his witch mother Sycorax by the devil-god Setebos.
• He's ugly, and somehow deformed, based on the way Prospero and Miranda talk about him.
• He's capable of doing menial labor, but he doesn't like it.
• Stephano and Trinculo, when they find him hiding under a cloak, think he might be a dead fish or something. He has an "ancient and fishlike smell."

As I was thinking about designing him, I sort of vacillated between two dramatic demands the play has for Caliban. When he is cursing Prospero in soliloquy, I think Caliban has to seem genuinely malicious and a little frightening. But when he's been seduced by Stephano, Trinculo, and their bottle of liquor, he suddenly slides downhill from being the villain of the piece to being ridiculed by the ridiculous. (In this way, his character trajectory almost resembles Malvolio's. Think how fun it would be to see the same actor playing those two parts in repertory.)

You can see Caliban costumed all sorts of ways for different productions of The Tempest. In fact, he might be one of the most fun Google Image searches I've ever done. Some people really play up the half-devil heritage. Some play up the fishiness. There's an awesome-looking full-size puppet Caliban that seems to favor humor over menace. I've even seen someone trying to design a Caliban with Sendak's Wild Things as a base.

I wanted to discard any worries about actually putting a human being into the "costume," and just design the "real Caliban" that the stage actor would be trying to approximate. If I'd seen the really fun Arthur Rackham illustration before I started working on mine, I'm sure I'd have been influenced by it.

These doodles seemed a little too far in the direction of malice for me. I'd already done another version that I liked better:

There's not must malice in that version of Caliban, but I like the way he looks anyway. I especially like the distortions of his anatomy. It's fun to picture those big shoulders toting a bundle of logs.

But then I started thinking about this "sympathetic Caliban" in the drinky scenes, and in Browning's "Caliban Upon Setebos," pondering the nature of his deity and the nature of the misfortunes inflicted upon him by Prospero's arrival.

That doodle is obviously very close to what I wound up drawing. I just let him get a little more zonked out as he dug deeper into the bottle.

I mentioned at the top of the post that I've been drawing Caliban on and off for years. I was able to put my hands on a couple of classroom doodles from my first year of grad school, fifteen years ago if I'm doing my math correctly. I don't have anything to say about these; I'm just sharing them in the interest of completeness.

Next week: fowl.

Alphabooksbeasts: B is for Bobo

For this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks character, I'm choosing a little chimpanzee who has recently become dear to my heart.

This week, B is for Bobo.

Maybe you've never heard of this cute little guy. I had no knowledge of him before the last few months, but now I sort of adore him. He's the star of three picture books: Hug, Tall, and Yes. Hug is a current favorite around my house.

In it, Bobo wanders through the jungle and the savannah, gradually realizing that all of the other animals have someone to cuddle, and he's alone.

(Bonus: sequential images. "Where's Bobo?" is an interesting question for this two-page spread.)

When his loneliness finally takes over, Bobo lets out a tortured barbaric yawp (which is also the word "hug," but in huge wavy letters), then settles down amidst the other animals to cry to himself.

Don't worry; the story has a happy ending. Bobo's mother finds him, and there are several really happy hugs at the end of the book.

I know it's sappy and a little too sweet, but I think Jez Alborough's cartooning is fun, and the colors in the book are gorgeous. I have read this book at least once a day for the past several months, and although the dialogue only uses three words, I am not bored with it. That's a strong endorsement, right?

Bobo was actually pretty hard for me to figure out, as a drawing. He's such a top-heavy little coffee-bean. I tried and tried. Eventually I got close, but I think copying Jez Alborough gave me something like my Mercer Mayer problem: these are just not character designs (or curves) that I would naturally come up with on my own.

Next week: a very ancient and fishlike smell.

Alphadonjon: B is for Boobooloo, King of the Olfs and Brock.

A week has gone by already? Well, here are two more crazy character designs from Trondheim and Sfar's terrific Dungeon comics.

 For this week's Alphabooks, B is for Boobooloo, King of the Olfs, and for Brock.

You may note that these fellows are both sporting the same belt and sword that Ababakar Octoflea was wearing last week. That's because they are, like Ababakar, both former wearers and wielders of the Sword of Destiny. Herbert the Duck, one of Dungeon's main characters, retrieves the Sword from Ababakar's beheaded body, and discovers not long thereafter that if anyone tries to take the sword from him — or if anyone merely touches his belt — Herbert will be transformed in a cloud of bones and ectoplasm into a previous wearer of the Sword, to avenge the transgression. (This is handy, because the sword won't let Herbert use it until he accomplishes three great deeds without it. Also, at least initially, he's quite a wimp.)

Anyway, Boobooloo is the first previous wearer of the Sword that gets summoned up, and he's a firecracker. Oh, he's small, but he's like a little basketball with fists and feet of steel. He shows up a few other times, including an extended appearance in one of the Monstres volumes set during the cataclysm at the end of the world.

As for Brock, well,

Now you know as much as I do. In the entirety of Dungeon, he appears in just one panel. But he's got a really fun design, doesn't he?

It took me a little while to figure this drawing out, mostly because I didn't know how these two guys would interact. Would they fight? They're like brothers in arms, because they're both wearers of the Sword. Maybe they'd high-five.

(You'll notice that at the brainstorming stages I'd forgotten that Brock was a snake from the waist down.)

Then I thought, "Okay, one guy is big and beefy, and the other one's a little berserker. Isn't there some sort of baseball metaphor for that sort of deal?"

Then it was just a matter of drawing. And taking away Brock's legs.

Next week, one more wearer of the Sword of Destiny, and maybe someone else.

Alphabooksbeasts: A is for archy

Okay, first of all, I officially retract that image of Aslan that I posted late Sunday night. I'm going to need to draw from Narnia later in my Alphabooks alphabet, and I wasn't too happy with the way Aslan turned out anyway.

 Actually, as it turns out, A is for archy, the free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach who cavorted on the keyboard of Don Marquis starting in 1916 (about seven years before e. e. cummings's first book, if you're keeping track of poets with odd typographical habits).

Maybe you've never heard of this poetical cockroach, but I first encountered him when I was a mere tyke, in a Time-Life book about insects and spiders that excerpted "archy declares war." (archy never uses capital letters, because while he is jumping around the typewriter he is unable to push down the shift key at the same time as a letter key. Kids, ask your grandparents about the medieval technology I'm talking about.)

I don't still have that book, and I haven't been able to determine for sure, but I think that same poem may have given me my first glimpse of the cartooning of George Herriman.

(I'm pretty sure this particular image did not appear in the book I had; I borrowed it from this blog post.)

You can get archy with Herriman cartoons here.

When I finally did see Krazy Kat during my undergrad days, maybe archy had to some extent made me ready for what I was going to see. For that, I thank the Time-Life company, I suppose.

I didn't want to try to ape Herriman for this drawing, though, in part because I'm planning to visit him later in the alphabet, but mainly because I know enough entomology (and have spent enough time with cockroaches) that I wanted to aim for a little more fidelity to the actual critter form. Here are some preliminary doodles.

I gave him boots in one drawing because I figured he'd need a little extra weight to get those typewriter keys to budge. They looked silly, though, so I gave him some leather shoes instead. The next doodle was pretty close to what I wound up with for pencils. In some ways, as usual, I like the sketch better than the finished inks: more energy, and a sort of scruffy quality that seems right for a cockroach.

If you're wondering what rules led me to pick and then reject Aslan, here are my personal guidelines for the AlphaBooks project:

1. I'm planning to do two alphabets this time, one of which will consist entirely of Donjon characters. 

2. For my other alphabet, as with Alphabeasts, I'm going to draw twenty-six characters from twenty-six different sources. 

3. None of my characters will be human beings. (Mostly they're animals. This is because I have been enjoying drawing creatures for the first two alphabet projects, and because my skills as a caricaturist are really still too minimal to be honed by a project like this.) 

4. That said, they'll all still be characters—that is, they'll have personalities that go beyond their natural animal qualities. (There may be an automaton or two in the list, but even they will be distinctive individuals.)

I've got the alphabet all planned out now (at last!), and I'm psyched to get drawing. Next week, we'll meet a little chimp, and not the one who spent time with the fortieth president.

Alphabeasts: Y is for Yahoo

Okay, I'm writing my Alphabeasts post at 4:00 AM and I still have some legitimate work to do tonight, so I'll keep the prose brief.

This week, Y is for yahoo. Not the search engine, of course, but the hominid beast imagined by Jonathan Swift in the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels.



Oh, sure, with the way that the satire works, the Yahoos are just a mirror image of the reader, savage human beings. But I have no doubt that Gulliver would have felt no compunction about putting a Yahoo in a zoo. Thus: beast.

I'm not really happy with the way my finished version turned out, but I have a few "process" doodles to show you. One is the sketch I used to create my final image, and to tell you the truth I wish I'd been able to translate it a little better. I like the energy of this pose a lot more, and I don't understand why.



There's also a little doodle that's meant to show a slothful yahoo in repose. That, too, could have turned into an interesting finished version.



As an extra bonus, here's a classroom doodle that I did when I was studying Gulliver in grad school. This would have been in the spring of 1995, I think. It was a very doodly semester for me.



Apparently my idea of the yahoo hasn't changed much in 17 years.

Next week, for the big finale, I'm hoping to do a double entry in Alphabeasts, with a creature from the deep past of a well-loved franchise and a different creature from the distant reaches of our solar system.

Okay, it's 4:30. Time to get back to work.

More AZ Fanart: Antiosour vs. Bonosour

Maybe you thought that hadpanagus and ichipotomas were enough for me. Nope! I like all of AZ's animal creations. I might even manage to catch up with her Alphabeasts alphabet if I do more than one a week.

And so I present you with antiosour and bonosour, who are natural enemies.



Originally, AZ posted these two creatures with no notes, so I had to try to figure out what I could about them just from the drawings.



My first thought was that the circles over their heads might be a sort of organic, permanently attached speech balloon or thought bubble.



Or, I thought, since bonosour seemed to be a bird, maybe they were ornamental feathers. But, as it turns out, such is not the case. Here's what AZ has to say about antiosour:

He is a crazy bad guy. He doesn’t do anything but sit around looking mad. He can’t even really move around. He tries to take over the world by sitting on a stool and electrocuting people with his antenna, which can send signals through electrical wires.

And as for bonosour? Well, his cranial appendage is an antenna, too:

AZ says, “Bonosour is a birdie. He never gets electrified because the electric in his antenna goes back to Antiosour’s antenna.” So, Bonosour is immune to Antiosour attacks, because he absorbs Antiosour’s electricity and shoots it back. Bonosour does not like Antiosour, because he is a good guy. But, curiously, he does not use his powers to save people; he only uses them to protect himself.

With that information in hand, I was able to work up this doodle or thumbnail.



And then it took me a couple of weeks to produce the finished art. Maybe I'll get my next drawing done more quickly. There are plenty of awesome AZ creatures where these came from!

Alphabeasts: F is neither for Flukeman nor for Flying Spaghetti Monster

Once again, the people (eleven of them, this time) have spoken. When I draw my Alphabeasts creatures this week, I will draw neither the Flukeman nor the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Sorry, guys. Better luck next time.



At least they're being good sports about it.

(You may now commence singing about the Flukeman to the tune of The Kinks' "Apeman." The Flukeman won't mind. He don't shiv.)

Alphabeasts: D is not for Dewback

Well, the people have spoken. Clearly, this week, D is not for Dewback.



Stay tuned.

Animal Alphabet: Z is for Zebra Swallowtail

Last week I promised a terrifying chimera for the final week of the Animal Alphabet.

Here it is!



Yes, Z is for the zebra swallowtail butterfly, as the title of this post indicates.

Maybe you don't think it is terrifying (or chimerical). Clearly, if you think that way, you don't know how these things are made. Here is a glimpse of that unholy alchemy. Click to see it more clearly.



Rumor has it that another alphabet is about to begin, full of imaginary (rather than authentic) creatures. I am consulting my sources and limbering my digits.

Animal Alphabet: V is for Vogelkop Bowerbird

A few people have expressed concern or curiosity, so if you're reading this and are worried about how my part of Vermont weathered Irene, let me say that our house was unscathed. Irene hit here as a lot of rain and wind, but really if I hadn't been warned I'd have had no reason not to think it was just a longer-than-usual summer storm. Spend your cares instead on the Schulz Library at CCS, in a different part of the state, a lot closer to a river and with more cause for concern.

This week's Animal Alphabet critter doesn't look like much:



But, in fact, the Vogelkop bowerbird is one of the most amazing instances of the variety and splendor of the natural world.

Rather than trying to impress his mate with elaborate feathers, wattles, or dancing displays, the male bowerbird builds and decorates a structure for the female to inspect. And the Vogelkop bowerbird, more than any of its relatives, constructs an impressive and wondrous gallery, collecting colorful seeds, flowers, fungus, snail shells, beetle elytra, and even human detritus from around the forest, and arraying these collections in an area under his bower as much as five or six yards across.

Every male collects different items and arranges them according to his personal (if that's the right word) taste.



This is a pretty crummy drawing. Go look at David Attenborough investigating a real Vogelkop bower.

I think you will agree with me on this point: if you were walking through the Vogelkop peninsula of New Guinea without any knowledge of the bowerbirds, and you encountered one of these structures with its array of ornaments and its piles sorted with obvious regard to aesthetics, you'd believe it was made by a human. Or a fairy. Or a spirit creature. Or a smurf. Something.

Next week: probably my last sea creature, and it's a doozy.

Animal Alphabet: U is for Uakari

Nothing special to say about this week's Animal Alphabet entry.

The uakari is a funny-looking monkey with a body like Hartza's and a head like a certain Nazi bedeviler of Captain America.



In other words, it looks like a tomato on a haystack.

Is this version better?



Next week: something like an art collector.

Animal Alphabet: Q is for Quoll (and Quetzal, too)

As it turns out, I have a drawing several years old that would work fine for this week's installment of the Animal Alphabet. I've colored it for the occasion.



That's from my abecedary entry into the "______ Are Always Fun to Draw" project from a few years ago that was, incidentally, my first introduction to the Animal Alphabet's deacon, Ben Towle. Maybe now would be a good time to mention that you can get that alphabet, plus another one with Medieval folk, in convenient micro-minicomic form, via this link.

If you're reading this and you've been contributing regularly to the Animal Alphabet, drop me a line via email (it's in my Blogger profile), and I'll send you those two little ABCs for free, just as my way to say how much fun I've been having as a contributor to the project.

Now, I like my quetzal drawing, and it was (as promised) fun to draw, way back when. But I didn't think it would be right to rest on my laurels this week, especially with so many Scrabble players checking this week's entries for ways to use their Qs.

And so, let me also present to you the largest living* marsupial predator in mainland Australia, and the second-largest living marsupial predator of all:



That's a tiger quoll. There are several species of quoll, all living in relatively small areas of Australia or New Guinea. They're about the size of housecats, I think, though the tiger quoll is the biggest of the bunch.

If you're wondering who the largest marsupial predator is (by weight), then please allow him to introduce himself.

I don't think my drawing actually does a good job of capturing the quoll's personality — its quollities, if you will. My initial doodles might actually have been a bit more quollified for that task.



And I kept wondering, as I thought about the quoll this week, why it starts with a Q instead of a K. There are, as I mentioned before, lots of antipodean animals whose names kick off with a K.



Have you kids met Keanu?

Why a quoll and not a kwall? Why a quokka, not a kwokka? Who can explain orthographical orthopraxis? Ah, alas.


*Speaking of "alas," the qualifier "living" has to appear in my lists of marsupial predators because of the almost certain demise, in the last century, of the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian wolf or the Tasmanian tiger. It lived long enough to be photographed, but not long enough for me to meet it. [Sadface emoticon here.]