Portrait of the eponymous character of "Beauty and the Beast", a take on the old story I'm writing.

Beast looks different every time I draw him; this is lampshaded in the story by his beastliness varying with his moods. Looks a bit like an allosaurus here. If he's really pissed off, he'll sprout extra spikes and horns, the plates of his skull shift about, his limb proportions alter, he might pop open another eye or grow fleshy catfish-style lip tendrils, that sort of thing.

I got the idea for this after watching Cocteau's film, the first time I'd ever seen it all the way through, on TV recently. You could really trace the pedigree of the Disney film right back to it. In both version, the beast was vaguely leonine and physically appealing in the manner of a large mammalian carnivore. Imagine if beast had looked like a giant tarantula-squid instead of a furry wet dream . . . would have made Beauty's ability to love him a little more impressive, eh?

So my beast isn't quite that gross, although he does have a bad drooling problem. This is more a portrait of his tongue, it looks like. His forelimbs are armed with talons and lack dexterity, so he uses the little finger tendrils on the tongue tip for fine manipulation. It can also taste the air, like a snake's - his hearing is decent, but his eyesight is lousy, so he depends on its tactile sensitivity to examine things in detail. The bioluminant yellow things are cartilaginous spikes, used to rasp meat off bone, which flatten and merge into a softer frill that runs down the side. Also like a reptile, his tongue is rooted at the front of the jaw, not the back. That tube looking thing is the glottis, the opening of the windpipe (snakes poke it out of their mouth so they can breathe when swallowing big prey). Because of the forward location of the glottis, the Beast's voice isn't booming - it's high, resonant, and rasping, a modulated hiss.