SUPAH SYBORAH!

Another quick character design. This one is from the Kaiju concept that's been rattling around in my head for some time now. I love Kaiju, and I've got a small notebook devoted to notes and scribblings for a massive giant-monster themed project that I've been slowly adding to for the past couple of years. Anything involving Kaiju needs to be given at least a bit of the tongue-in-cheek approach. Treating it too seriously often results in disaster as happened with Emmerich and Devlin's American GODZILLA, although that could be blamed solely on them being plain bad filmmakers. CLOVERFIELD showed that it can be done completely seriously, however, as did the original GODZILLA, but I think those instances of success are few and very far between. The most far-out crazy treatment of the subject, I think, can be found in the wonderfully fun and intentionally hilarious KAIJU BIG BATTEL. KBB's giant monsters appear as brilliantly-costumed wrestlers beating the parts off each other amidst foamboard skyscrapers. I've had the pleasure of attending one of their live matches and it was sheer bliss.

Anyway, I haven't yet decided where on the Kaiju spectrum I want to seat my project. It's not going to be CLOVERFIELD-type storytelling, but I may not want to go quite as ridiculous as KBB. We'll just have to see where this takes me. I'll be digging out more character sketches as I go and fleshing out some of the beasts and monsters bit by bit. This guy is named SUPAH SYBORAH, and he's basically the JET JAGUAR (or ULTRAMAN) of my Kaiju universe. Who is JET JAGUAR, you ask? He's a human-sized robot that can grow to monster-size to battle alongside (or against) Godzilla. That's all I've got to say about him for now. More later!

"The GREEP is coming to chew on you!"

My little girl, Parker, is 6 years old, and she loves to tickle and play with her daddy. One of her favorite games involves turning off all the lights in the bedroom (when it's dark outside), shutting the door so no light comes in, and trying to avoid me as I pretend to be a monster/dinosaur/fiend who's trying to eat her. I gave my monster an off-the-cuff name the other night: the Greep. It's also the sound the Greep makes as it stalks it's prey: "Greep, greep!"

She wanted to sit down with me and draw what the Greep looks like, so we each sketched out what we were seeing in our heads as we played. So, these are our versions of the Greep. Guess which belongs to whom...