I found myself cringing when the tupperware container told me I had to draw a dragon because I just couldn’t get the image of Alan Lee’spicture of Smaug sleeping on all of that gold out of my head and I couldn’t think of anything else. For a while I thought that I’d rationalize that the slip of paper didn’t say what kind of dragon and go with a Chinese dragon (I’d just watched a pretty good version of Journey to the West and the scene going to the dragon king’s under sea palace was sticking in my mind) But somehow that didn’t seem right. Sure Chinese Dragons are still monsters but they don’t seem like scary halloween monsters.
Ultimately out of desperation I fell back on comedy. So here we have a dragon expecting it’s annual tribute getting a decoy princess.
I’ll be honest I was stumped for a bit when the Inktober tupperware told me to draw the Goblin Market, despite my interest in the topic I’d never actually read the Christina Rossettipoem So I was mostly going with what Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess and Ted Naifeh did with it… After that I just winged it.
This might be my first turkey of the series. I’d had an interesting workout that involved being about fifty yards short of hitting a car that had just made a u-turn so epically sloppy it blocked the bike lane and screwing up my time big time.
So when I finally got out of the shower and had my breakfast and coffee, the magic Inktober tub told me that I had to draw the Vanishing Hitchhiker… I suppose I might have been more inspired if hadn’t already done a female ghost earlier this week or could have thought of a composition that wasn’t suspiciously similar to my Mothman sketch from last year… So I guess I kind of phoned the is one in…
The gods of Inktober have been fickle and demanded I draw two youkai in a row.
This time I had to draw Yuki-Onna and since I didn’t sleep very well last night and wasn’t feeling particularly creative, drew my version of Yuki-Onna a thoroughly modern and terrifying elemental spirit who, when not taking an interest in sleepy drummers, haunts the frozen alleyways of the inner city, looking under bridges, doorways and broken heat vents for the defenseless and exposed.
The Halloween season is one of my favorite times of the year and by no coincidence whatsoever yields all of my favorite kinds of films. To warm up I decided to start my first of October Double Feature with two of my favorite eccentrics Vincent Price and Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe’s Masque of the Red Death had always been my favorites of Poe’s repertoire as I generally find it a marvelous study of human decadence corruption, and divine retribution. I’d certainly been aware of the Roger Cormanversion I never was particularly interested in it because I’d heard that it took some serious liberties with the material. While this is indeed true it’s mainly because once you get past a vivid description of the castle and the party and the inevitable climax there really isn’t that much to work with.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Corman did a good job padding the plot, along with mixing in the plot of another Poe story, Hop Frog. Vincent Price is great playing Prince Prospero as a sadistic tyrant who holds up the nobility in his castle as his lands die of the red death (though personally I thought making him a Satanist as well was overdoing it.) The Red Death is treated as a cold force of nature, yes it serves justice to Prospero in the end but with only six people surviving does it really count? It’s not so much a case of serving retribution as it is going after Prospero because he dared trying to break the rules. I liked how most people seemed to take it almost for granted frequently mistaking it for a priest when it appears.
All in all I enjoyed if very much with my only big complaint being all of the heroes having the combined intellect of a brick.
The other film I picked An Evening of Edgar Allan Poeturned out to be a short collection of Price reciting four of Poe’s stories. This made for what were essentially four one man stage plays, which Price did very well and made for a good introduction to the material. I found it interesting since I’d heard Price do several of those stories in audiobooks. In most of those he did the readings completely straight but in this production this was over the top even by Price’s atmospheric standards.
Today’s reach into the Inktober tupperware container brought out Tengu!
These have always been a favorite of mine one because they’re cool and two because I like crows and corvids in general. So because of that despite the big nosed red-faced winged imp is nearly as common for me it’s always been about the crow like Karasu-tengu!
And since once you get past all the stuff associating them with ninjas and martial arts most of the good stories about them seem to involve them trying to corrupt or merely harass monks here’s a sketch of them casing the joint before they make their move!
