Monstrous!

As Ms. Brugger and I continue our renovation of the old homestead in
Martinsville, we continually dig up intriguing relics from the days of yore —
well, my yore, anyway. Tucked away in the corners of the house, I have scads
of old art portfolios, and this morning, I came upon several pieces I haven’t
seen in years. I knew these beasties lurked up in the attic, as I have
periodically excavated some of the ruins, but seeing them again brought a
lovely onslaught of nostalgia for all things daikaiju.


In junior high school, I created Japanese Giants , a fanzine devoted to Godzilla, kith & kin, more or less patterned after
my dear, late friend Greg Shoemaker ’s renowned
Japanese Fantasy Film Journal . For me, Japanese Giants was a one-shot, but the title lived
on, first via editor/publisher Brad Boyle , who took the reins until
issue #4, and then by way of friends Ed Godziszewski and
Bill Gudmundson , who kept the magazine going for several years into the
21st Century.


By high school, I had grandiose plans of becoming a writer/illustrator, and
sometime in my senior year, I drew up a few pages of what I considered the
ultimate Godzilla story (see illos below). However, around that time, I found
myself increasingly distracted by young women of the opposite sex, and my
dream project never progressed beyond that initial sample. Still, somewhere in
those years, I composed a fun little SF monster story called “Night of the
Firebeast,” which featured a giant winged reptilian critter (see illo above)
from the planet Venus called Damiron (or Damarron, in at least one of the
tale’s numerous revisions). I drew a ton of pictures of the monster, and
friend Bill Gudmundson, who regularly constructed detailed, articulated models
(and animated them, à la Ray Harryhausen ), built a couple of different
versions of Damiron for me. I still have one of those models, a bit worse for
wear, but still holding together.
In college, having discovered the writings of H.P. Lovecraft — and by now
entertaining grandiose notions of becoming a famous horror writer — I rewrote
“Night of the Firebeast” as a weird hybrid of daikaiju and Lovecraftian lore,
still featuring Damiron but under the name “Pachacutec” (the actual name of a
Peruvian king, which I considered apt, since the story was now set in Peru). I
went full bore illustrating scenes from it, mostly in pen and ink. Although
the tale was hardly the masterpiece I had envisioned in my budding little
brain, it felt pretty solid (and at some point — early 2000s, I believe — I
sent a copy of the tale to J.D. Lees , editor of
G-Fan magazine, who up and published the thing). “Pachacutec”
became the first chapter of my first honest-to-god novel, again titled “Night
of the Firebeast,” which I finished a year or so post-college — just after I
moved to Chicago to live with Bill G. The novel, such as it was, never saw the
light of day, but I consider it a valuable practice run for my
novels that eventually did come to fruition.


In later years, Pachacutec appeared again in a short story, this one entitled
“The Transformer of Worlds,” published in an Australian anthology of giant
monster stories, simply titled
Daikaiju , edited by Rob Hood .


If I get a chance, I'll photograph and post the complete set of drawings and
paintings I created for “Pachacutec,” if not for your entertainment then for
mine, as I do find these personal chronicles useful for looking back to figure
out what the hell I was thinking at any given point in time.

Beware!