So I've been oddly obsessed with the idea of child-eating monsters for the last year. Who knows why? I just get on these weird squirrel hunts sometimes. Anyway, when I say child-eating monsters, I'm not talking about any old monster that might happen to eat the odd child as it eats anyone else, I'm talking mostly about that specific class of monsters invented by parents to scare the bejeezus out of their darling kids and make sure that the little brats stay in line ie. bogeymen. Or bogeymans. Not sure how you would pluralize that, I guess it might be bogeymans just like how the plural of Batman would be Batmans.

I finally decided I would try to exorcise this obsession by doing some drawings of the more interesting monsters I'd found in this research and I ended up putting together a thin little volume that I'm calling YOUR GUIDE TO CHILD-EATING MONSTERS. I'll probably have it with me at FC just for funsies, but this picture of THE ERLKING (from the Goethe poem of thesame name) turned out so good that I wanted to share it here.

The erlking is a character that's been proven remarkably elusive to my drawing abilities. He's not the typical monster who just gulps kids down out of carnal gluttony; his motives for his kidnappings are a bit more unknowable. My earlier attempts to draw him never looked quite right. I wanted him to look strange and otherworldly but also not necessarily wicked -- just very other, like he's something beyond human notions of morality that we'll never understand. I also wanted a look that was, for lack of a better word, somewhat regal, since he is technically a king, after all. It all started to fall into place once I decided to steal his look from a book of medieval hunting scenes. Anyway, better artists than I can produce better takes on the character, but I was rather pleased with how this came out.

For once, the poor proportions were intentional. I thought that making his upper body a bit too big for his legs helped give him a slight air of menace. He might look civilized in his finery, but I wanted there to remain a faint threat of the untamed wild beneath it all.

OMG I TALK TOO MUCH BLUR