This might seem drastically different, but the face of this new design can still curl up into the more toucan-like shape of the original version, and the body can fold up the same way at rest. So when "Standing," this has the same design the old one does, but its "flight mode" is now a bit different.
This is to emphasize that the plaguemen aren't bird-derived; for this update I borrowed most heavily from chimaera fish!
It will go "public" once the updated art is complete for the other plaguemen; the basic Mumblegog will actually remain exactly the same as its existing art, but colorized!
There may still be touch-ups to do, and I'm not yet sure about the color scheme - although it is largely accurate to a real bluebottle fly.
I've intended to update Blobotle for many years, but was dissatisfied with dozens of sketches I went through. This version is the final culmination of weighing everything I love about flies and attempting to keep that dash of "human" that defines Arthropoids.
The idea for this monster was something that pretends to be dead and rotting, which is a popular tactic in nature; many animals pretend to be dead as a defense mechanism, while many plants imitate carrion to attract pollinating insects.
Hoaxidermy does both, but also lures scavengers that can become its prey!
The very first thing I knew I wanted in this design was that it shouldn't simply be an animal that looks dead; that would just come off as some kind of zombie.
The various carrion-mimicking plants often tend to have abstract shapes, resembling no particular animal, but with colors, textures and cavities evocative of dead and gaping meat. I drew inspiration from this as well as from the way a hog-nosed snake looks when it plays dead, and also borrowed a bit from an illustration of a hard, blue-grey cyst in the "Hara no Mushi."
With its fuzzy, swollen body and naked, pink, slimy tail, Hoaxidermy is also meant to resemble a bit of roadkill opossum combined with earthworm, while its scaly blue surface adds some fish and reptile elements.
These are some of the sprites I've currently completed myself; I've shown two of them (Beeblezug and Pustulump) on Kickstarter, but here's also Bezulga, Foulmonella, Stingg, Scrabies and Slurpentine!
You likely know what's slammed me with work the last few months (again!!) but put in your requests, even any you've made before that I've still not finished!
After this round, I might change them up again, maybe retire the review requests since they're not frequently used and are sometimes tough to gather good material for.
A double addition to Mortasheen, chosen by popular pick on the kickstarter from over 20 new monster sketches!
Salivite is a pure healer with no major damaging attacks, seen as an ally by default to almost all other monsters.
For its design, I wanted it to look very alien but also very dopey and innocent looking. I drew inspiration from the Loch Ness Monster, inflatable pool toys, sea slugs, echinoderms, coral and lichens. Resemblance to Leucochloridium parasites was actually kind of accidental, with the concentric green and tan rings drawing mainly from the lichen aspect!
This makes me think maybe the leucochloridium-style wormbrains are actually imitating this monster's color patterns as a lure. Should I retroactively declare that? It feels too narrow and specific. I'm wondering if, instead, the same color pattern could feature in an in-universe fungus or fruit pod that's desirable enough for both wormbrains and Salivite to imitate as an attractant.
The predatory mimic, Salibite, started with a clawed, bony humanoid body hidden under the disguise, but that ultimately felt boring. I do often like simple humanoid ghouls because then their weirder aspects and abilities stand out more, but this was a monster that needed to be weirder all the way through, so I went with an otyugh-like sedentary beast.
On Kickstarter and tumblr I mention that I intended five visual hints that would give away Salibite's camouflage. There are:
-Salibite's antennae end in ocelli (simple eyes) rather than sonar-emitting cups.
-Salibite has sharp, stiff claws on its tail rather than Salivite's soft tentacles.
-Salibite is missing the facial tentacles.
-Salibite lacks the five-pronged vein.
-This was initially subtler in my first version of the artwork (still visible on the kickstarter's updates) but Salibite only has "spots" on its skin to imitate the Salivite's chemosensory tissue patches.
I also intended the markings to evoke another "face" above Salibite's jaws, though I don't know if this is unique to the "specimen" illustrated or varies between individuals. I might declare a sixth difference in that the markings on Salibite are more symmetrical and predictable like this.
This monster actually hails all the way back to some of my concepts for "Noisy Tenant," the horror setting that also evolved into Awful Hospital. In "Noisy Tenant," one monster was a living toy mouse that existed only to lure and prey upon cats, dogs or other nonhuman predators that wound up in the monster house.
Early concepts for this Mortasheen version put the legs on the "head" of the mouse and gave it a much longer, winding tail and nose, but in the end I thought putting the legs on the "tail" gave it a more alien feel, even less like something that ever had any biological connection to a rodent or even any animal life as we know it.
One idea that I scrapped was that the insides of the ears would have glowing red targets in them; it wound up cluttering the design too much, and it just didn't look that good.
The hunting strategy of this monster is based on a cookie cutter shark. In the real world, these sharks are thought to deliberately entice larger predators, only to turn around and take a bite of their own. Their jaws are specially adapted to instantaneously carve out one good chomp of meat before they get away!
Making this monster a Joker was part of a decision to expand the class beyond just "creepy clowns," which I think have run their course.
Attached is a photoshop file for anyone who likes to analyze that kind of thing!
I don't know where I got a fascination for dead, rotten sea life as monster fodder; maybe it's just that I like sea life, and I like undead monsters, and nothing gets quite as putrid and ghoulish as a fish carcass baking on a beach.
Globsters are a long-time favorite "cryptid," even if I know they're all just half-eaten basking sharks, and I do have more than one Mortasheen creature evoking the concept.
This one however is the "most" Globster Mortasheen there is, being adapted from a fake Pokemon concept and now tying in with Mortasheen's family of smelly, walking fish.
For the design, I originally planned a shaggy, ragged looking pile of tissue with a whole lot of polypous growths resembling sponges, corals and barnacles, but that's not what a real globster looks like, and would perhaps work better for another unrelated monster. I compromised by giving it a number of veins, pores, and the many large tubes that are actually kind of borrowed from sea squirts, but also comes out looking pleasantly like an enormous heart or body organ.
One thing that changed many times in conceiving of this monster was the relative size of the skeleton fish. At points, they were long serpentine things winding all around the globster, at other points they were just a couple of huge hydra-like skeletal fish heads. I finally settled more on a swarm of smaller ones so that they wouldn't distract too much from the globster itself, and because I love the idea of something like a "hive" of "bugs," but it's a bunch of dead fish.
The idea to have longer, more fearsome fish-bone heads emerging from the same mass may be applied to something else; maybe combined with the "tumorous coral reef" idea I mentioned early for a future counterpart to this creature, or an even larger more "legendary" entry into this line.
The arms are meant to feel ambiguously like a pair of flippers on a turtle-like animal and a pair of tentacles on a more mollusk-like animal, while the head is a homage to Hideshi Hino's Bug Boy, particularly this cover artwork: https://upload.bitfeed.co/5b9b803c1621b-bug-boy-hino
Attached is the art file; this monster has an excessive number of shadow and highlight layers.
So if you don't check my tumblr, twitter or front page of bogleech.com very often, you might have missed that this is finally happening.
Feel free to ask anything you like here! ALL free digital material I release for the kickstarter backers in the coming year, I will also release for you guys on the patreon, along with developmental stuff!
Attached is a partial PDF download of my first ever novel, Return of the Living. This is the first eight chapters, since my editor would rather me not release the entire book as just a PDF file!
I used to have some plastic egg toys that could unfold into "dinosaurs," and the result were these ridiculous reptilian creatures whose bodies were still just eggs. I think I was channeling those when this design came to me, and I knew I wanted its body to be pockmarked something weaponized.
An early idea was that it'd be covered in crater-like pits that vent some sort of gas, but that felt kind of too expected for Mortasheen. A creature that grows independent weapons from its body, meanwhile, feels expected but isn't really something I explored enough until recently. I immediately wanted it to generate traps it could lay out, something I also touched on with one of the "scrap" monsters a year or so ago.
My earliest sketches of this monster's head also had the toothy, beaky gums bending away from each other, something seen in a few pterosaurs and deep sea fish, but the addition of a second set of teeth and lips surrounding it, like the sandworms from Beetlejuice, was last-minute and I'm still not quite sure if I like how that came out or not. I wanted it to have more of a maniacal, smiling look to it, but instead it came out with more of an innocent baby bird look, which I like but have also used in a lot of other designs.
I also messed around with various color schemes, but my first visual of the creature was pale whitish, and nothing else felt quite right. The killer boils also went through many, MANY changes, from pac-man-like biting orbs (something I'd still like to use for another monster) to prickly thornballs to explosive tangles of "roots," but I kept coming back to a starfish-like design, and wound up modeling them after a specific group of "pumpkin sea stars" found in the deep ocean.
So, nearly a year ago today, I may have mentioned in passing on my tumblr that I was working on something really cool, but not likely to ever see the light of day. We knew within weeks that it was on indefinite hold and probably dead in the water, so I'm REASONABLY certain I can show off a little of my work here by now.
Maxwell Atoms (you know him as creator of Billy and Mandy) approached me in about August 2019 for character design work, my first ever gig for anything of the sort. I signed a contract with Warner Brothers and worked long-distance over the course of two months on around six characters for a series pitch.
He basically wanted several of his characters completely redesigned, one of them being ZOOG here! I've included his original version, a small sample of the sketches and doodles I sent him, and my final illustration based on the features he liked best.
My spouse Rev actually came up with the ammonite-shell aspect which was unanimously well received.
I knew going in that most cartoon pitches are passed up on, and it never made it to an official pitch before they put a pin in it during a big network reshuffling, but it was still really exciting and fulfilling to do something like this at all.
This is another request I turned into more of a "reimagination," as well as somewhat cartoonier. I guess this is more like Birkin as an Awful Hospital slob monster, which is only fair because he totally inspired their aesthetic. I always loved Birkin's giant eyeball, and that it's just kinda hanging out in a nonsensical place on his various forms, but I always wondered what might happen if his anatomy were changing around the eye as more of a focal point.
Specifically a request for "cute and sexy" merwomen of Mortasheen's Gill-Men race. Most of their kind aren't terribly exotic looking; a little more in the "fish gijinka" side, kind of like the fish men from One Piece actually.
A hypothetical Mortasheen zombie spawn (but feel free to consider it canon!) symbiotic with tongue lice, constantly regrowing the tongue that sustains its swarm. I dunno what a good name might be. Cymouthoa?
There's just something about dead, rotten fish I find exceptionally cool, creepy and surreal as imagery. I already poured this into a few other monsters, but then the Junjo, a "reverse mermaid," wound up being kind of my ultimate smelly fish monster. This still wasn't really enough, since I kept having idea after idea for more cousins to give it, and since the Junjo is a "reverse mermaid," I wanted to do a "reverse reverse mermaid" too; it has a human torso and a fish tail, but the fish tail is the head end.
Every monster in this family also incorporates parasitic crustaceans in some way, and I flip-flop on whether I should actually make them Wormbrains. This would mean that the parasitic crustaceans are in turn controlled by the brain flukes that control other wormbrain species. It makes more sense the more I consider it, but I also kind of liked the rotten merfolk to be their own thing.
Diamrem's name is literally just "Mermaid" backwards, but oddly almost nobody noticed.
Attached are Sai and PSD files if you want to play around with them!
Well, he doesn't exactly have any details you missed at low resolution, but here he is!
Early, scrapped concepts had a human doctor who was unambiguously villainous, even pushing his own alternative therapy methods for profit and now trapped in the hospital by mistake, but I didn't like that idea; it felt too obvious. The bad dude was scrapped and replaced with an entirely different human doctor, whom the readers by now have realized is not necessarily evil, but may not be all that he seems, either.
His design is taken heavily from the Laughing Salesman, a supernatural anime character who swindles humans in bizarre ways, as kind of a callback to the character Dr. Man wound up replacing. He would have a similar voice to the Laughing Salesman if you want to look him up on youtube.
My favorite joke with this guy was when I gave him a coffee mug full of green sludge and the commenters kept speculating it was some kind of poison, mucus, something no human would ever drink but all along it was a kale smoothie, something that only TASTES like inedible monster sludge.
This monster was actually drawn with a very different, backwards method from usual; I did the colors first, without any line art, then I added lines after the fact with a quick "cheat" method. This actually allowed me to draw the spines, claws and ribs of the umbrella with much more precision than if I had outlined them first and then filled them in!
For the first time, I've also attached the actual working file for this monster. If you have paint tool sai or paint shop pro, you can open it and see how the different layers and shading effects work!
Scumbrella was actually first conceived as a joker class monster, and it was a brain-sucking parasite called the Dumbrella. While I still like that a lot, a more ferocious storm-themed acid-rain monster just felt more tempting for me to do. If I ever decide to do "Dumbrella" anyway, it'll feel odd to have two unrelated umbrella pun monsters, so then I'd be tempted to rationalize it by making it a series of them for every single monster class, and that would be over a dozen umbrella puns to figure out! We can't have that!!!
I tried to give this monster a slinking, serpentine pose where the open part of the umbrella would feel like a "mouth" and the spinal proboscis like a "tongue," but it's also readable like the spine is a tail, which is intentional. A squid similarly has a debatable "front and back end" and I wanted this to feel a little squiddy.
To make things smoother, every $10 is now worth one request, which I actually thought was how I'd always written it? I know it's how most people used it anyway! It can now be a colored doodle again, since I think I've become much more comfortable doing quick digital drawings that still look "nice" to me.
I'll still finish all the review requests that were put in, but from now on I'd prefer not to review people's own creations; it was always meant to be for things you like from other media like video game bosses, movie monsters and so forth!
Strange School was a tumblr webcomic inspired by Awful Hospital, which developed its own following and went on for several years! It's now been followed up by Strange School: Even Stranger, and since it took me forever, I decided to color this request.
The same requester as the last upload also wanted to see what happens when someone with a fear of snakes is accidentally sent a real snake by the Hospital
A request for a Hospital entity that exists to treat the fear of snakes, through exposure therapy, befriending a patient who isn't afraid of snakes anyway.
The whole staff in charge of phobias would probably be these puppeteer arms in different costumes.
