Alphabooksbeasts: I is for IT

For my non-Donjon Alphabooks entry, I have chosen a disembodied brain that I hope will be familiar to all of you.

Yes, I is for IT.

IT's name is not an acronym. IT's just capitalized because you're supposed to speak ITs name with fear and respect. IT dominates the minds of an entire world. IT is what Big Brother wishes he could be.

IT poses some compositional puzzles, if you're just working from the description in Wrinkle in Time.

For starters, IT is on a dais inside ITs dark dome-shaped building, but L'Engle doesn't say whether the disembodied brain is floating in a sort of receptacle, or in a terrarium, or just sort of flopped onto the dais in a pile. I opted for the fishtank approach.

Second, IT is supposed to be larger than a human brain. I exaggerated this a bit, but if you're just drawing a brain in a tank, how is anyone to get a sense of scale? I had to put Meg and Charles Wallace into the picture as points of reference.

I had a lot of time to think about this drawing before I had a chance to put it on paper, so I guess it's no surprise that my first doodle is pretty close (in terms of composition) to the final version.

Next week: a stickleback and the fisherman who catches him.

Alphadonjon: I is for Isis and Isidore the Scribe

Okay, this is another week in which I'm composing my Alphabooks posts at about 4:00 AM on Sunday/Monday, and I don't need to make an even later night of this. Let's be brief.

I is for Isis, the Kochak Princess, and for Isidore the Scribe, bearer of the Sword of Destiny.

In Dungeon, one woman turns out to be the love interest of both Hyacinthe (as the Keeper) and Herbert, two of the main characters in the series. If I understand Terra Amata genetics correctly, she even seems to have had children with both of them. And that's Isis, the Kochak Princess.

Isis is supposed to be sexy, but not in a cheesecake sort of way. Rather, her sexiness comes from confidence, competence, and self-determination, as well as a mysterious or at least checkered past. It's that last factor that's symbolized by her hip tattoo: she's been a member of a thieves' guild. (If you can't see the tattoo, maybe you can click to enlarge.)

So: there's your sexy cat-woman, as promised last week.

As for the sorrowful scribe: meet Isidore. He appears in the book occasionally when someone tries to steal the Sword of Destiny, as he is one of the Sword's former wearers. He wore it, however, for only twelve seconds before someone killed him and claimed the sword. (I haven't read the volume in which this story is told, because it's one of Dungeon's French-only publications. Maybe one day.) Anyway, that's why I didn't put the Sword around his waist: I figured by the time I could explain it, you'd be more than twelve seconds into this post.

Not much to tell beyond that. I include a couple of doodles so we can carry on the conversation about energy in the sketch versus the finished product. I know I like the facial expressions on Isis better in these sketches. Alas.

Was that my idea of a brief post?

Next week: I'll be traveling, but I'm hoping to schedule a post with a creature (or is he two creatures?) before I leave.

Arthurian Alphabooks: H is for Hallewes

With this week's Arthurian Alphabooks drawing, you may be forgiven for thinking that H is for Headdress—

Believe it or not, the headdress is closely patterned on an illustration from a genuine medieval manuscript!

—but in fact H is for the lady Hallewes, a minor character in Malory's "Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake" from Le Morte Darthur. Minor—but unforgettable, because she is One Creepy Dame. Hallewes is a sorceress who has employed her magic(ks) to create an enchanted trap for either Gawain or Lancelot, whichever, though really she has her heart set on Lancelot. And just what does she want with him? Why, to love him, naturally. And if he won't love her back, that's hardly an obstacle. Let her speak for herself:

     "And Sir Lancelot, now I tell thee, I have loved thee these seven year, but there may no woman have thy love but Queen Guenevere; and since I might not rejoice thee nother thy body on live [=alive], I had kept no more joy in this world but to have thy body dead. Then would I have [em]balmed it and cered it [=wrapped it in waxed cloths], and so to have kept it my live days—and daily I should have clipped thee [=embraced thee] and kissed thee, despite of Queen Guenevere."
     "Ye say well," said Sir Lancelot. "Jesu preserve me from your subtle crafts!"

While the whole episode takes up just a few paragraphs in a massive tome, I find that the specter of the lady's necrophiliac canoodling with a mummified Lancelot produces an outsized horror. Brrr!

*     *     *     *     *

And now, a process note or two (mostly for Isaac's benefit, as he has expressed interest or at least tolerance for these in the past). As the caption below the above picture indicates, I actually did a little visual research for this drawing, consulting a few books of medieval images to find a headdress that I thought was suitably wacky and some clothing that seemed appropriately wanton for a dangerous woman driven crazy by desire. (I borrowed the headdress and the rest of the clothing from two different illustrations, but in both cases the women pictured seemed more assertive in their desires than is often the case in illustrations from this period; if anything, the neckline of the dress in the original manuscript image plunged even further than in my drawing above.)

For the second week in a row, I tried to see what it was like to ink a vellum sheet laid over my original sketch. Oddly enough, my brush seemed to behave like a nib pen when I began (as I often do) by inking in the eyes. I remembered that Gary Martin, author of two books on comic-book inking, suggests an exercise where the inker should try to achieve brush effects with nibs and nib effects with brushes. I'd been trying to get a brushy calligraphic line out of a nib pen ever since I was a kid: my first cartooning efforts were full-on imitations of Walt Kelly, and I simply didn't know at first that he used a brush rather than a pen. (In my defense, I was seven at the time.) But making a brush line look like pen work seemed like a weird (and difficult) exercise to me. Now that I've accidentally achieved something of that effect, in at least parts of this drawing, I can see the virtue in making the single tool more versatile, and given my recent problems with ink blots from nib pens it might even be more practical to use a brush for my "pen" lines, thereby to reduce the risk of blots and smears. Still, I suspect that the pen-like qualities might be owing more to the unfamiliar tooth of the vellum surface and/or the viscosity of my ink.

I also had a more practical reason for using vellum, which is that my preliminary sketch this week was drawn not in pencil but in ballpoint pen, which is a lot harder to erase than pencil. That did mean, however, that the rough sketch survived the ink job, so for the sake of comparison here it is below (slightly blurry and rendered in grey rather than the original blue):

It's a commonplace of cartooning to lament that finished drawings lack some of the energy or spontaneity of the rough art. Well, sure, and there are ways in which this rough drawing probably does a better job of making Hallewes look crazy; but to my eye, at least, this rough version of Hallewes also looks less like a highborn lady or a credible amorous threat to Lancelot. She also looks a little too robust, so I made sure to gaunt her up a bit in the finished drawing, which accounts for her thinner lips in the inks. (As for the heavy shading around the eye sockets in the final version, it occurred to me while inking that I might want to suggest "the skull beneath the skin" in this person who, if not herself "possessed by death," wanted to possess Lancelot in death).

I kind of like the face in the rough drawing—it looks like a usable study for some other character—but, despite the label scrawled at the lower right of the picture, I don't find the rough drawing very convincing as Hallewes. So score one for the finished drawings, for a change.

Herbert and Hyacinthe, Corrected

You guys, I am embarrassed. I let my drawing of Hyacinthe and Herbert go out on the internet (even into sketchy neighborhoods like Tumblr) with an error!

I have fixed it below. I leave it to you eagle-eyed readers to spot the difference and identify it in the comments section.

Alphabooksbeasts: H is for Humbug

For this week's non-Donjon Alphabooks, I have paid a visit to a book I enjoyed quite a bit as a kid.

You may recall that in the 1961 novel The Phantom Tollbooth, our your protagonist Milo is accompanied by a watchdog named Tock and a flim-flam insect called the Humbug.

I had originally hoped to make my Humbug look a little like P.T. Barnum, but none of the portraits I could find of Barnum made him look much like a bunko rascal. (More like an avuncular scamp.) Anyway, I took my cues from some textual clues and made the Humbug look a little dandified.

You may be more accustomed to seeing the Humbug like this, as he appears in the book's original illustrations by Jules Feiffer:

(Here he is, talking to Milo)

Or, perhaps, if you're conversant with the feature-film Phantom Tollbooth, this will be the Humbug you picture (on the right, duh).

(Here's the source for that Chuck Jones image.)

I wanted to work from the way the Humbug is described, however, and although there's not much visual description in Phantom Tollbooth (which is more concerned with the fun of language than with non-linguistic details), we do get some information:

...from around the wagon stepped a large beetlelike insect dressed in a lavish coat, striped pants, checked vest, spats, and a derby hat. "Let me repeat—BALDERDASH!" he shouted again, swinging his cane and clicking his heels in midair.

So apparently the Humbug goes for sartorial hodgepodge. Does the result look a little bit more 1968 than 1961to you?

Here's a doodle.

Next week: some disembodied evil, and maybe an outer-space sea-slug. We'll see.

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.

Arthurian Alphabooks: G is for the Green Knight [en série]

Because I somehow wound up committing myself to yearbook-style portraits for my early Arthurian characters, I went ahead and penciled one for the Green Knight before deciding to get more lively with the image in my previous post. But having penciled the headshot, I felt obliged to ink it. It's still fairly lively, though, in a Brian Blessed-as-Prince-Vultan sort of way (though not deliberately so), and I've given it a greenish cast to befit its subject. And here ya go: