heartbulb

Mary

A rough sketch I did in preparation for an ink & watercolor drawing...

Luke Cage says:

Black beginning

Interviewed by the Agency

The good people at the Lightbulb Detective Agency have posted an interview with me on their whimsical blog.

They were very cordial and professional, and they never once made me cry.

the unwhisperable secret of secrets

I found these photos on my camera yesterday...

Bunkfiend

From out of the vault...

George Armstrong Custer

wordless books

A fountain of inspiration. A re-dedication of purpose. A shot fired across the bow of awesome.

first were-president

Many Americans are not aware that James K. Polk was, in fact, the nation's first werewolf President:

A photograph of Polk, taken just prior to his "wolfing out" and savagely maiming Mr. Mathew Brady, Presidential photographer and father of photojournalism.

A period artist's rendition of Polk's more lupine form--his appearance here is pure conjecture.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Me impersonating Kevin O'Neill...

astronautin' II

astronautin'

Radial-Symmetry Man

Powers & Abilities: arm regeneration, has two stomachs, can be divided into similar halves by any plane that contains the main axis, Olympic-level tumbler

Mary

"The judge smiled."

Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. For my money, just about the greatest antagonist in literary history...

the multiverse?

Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

From a really amazing article in the latest Discover magazine...read it all here

a paladin in hell

Here's a scan of a photocopy of a drawing I did based on David Sutherland's "A Paladin in Hell" illustration from the AD&D Player's Handbook...


And here's the Sutherland original...


Did you know?: Sutherland created Wemic (lion-centaurs). In D&D, not in real-life (though man, wouldn't that be something!)

blasphemous fish-frog

"I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked ... They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible."

--The Shadow over Innsmouth

silhouette

night-gaunt

"When I was 6 or 7 I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities (called by me 'night-gaunts'—I don't know where I got hold of the name) used to snatch me up [and] carry me off..."

--H.P. Lovecraft

mystery girl

Trying to figure out the face of a character in "The Big Black"...

sketchbook page

lady

president-elect

Also, what has Dax been listening to lately?

What has Dax been reading lately?

happy halloween

Only the devil's weakness can put a smile on that face.

I can't quit John McCain.

I once read about some guy who became obsessed with painting Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus. I'm worried that I might become that guy with John McCain. I don't know what the deal is, but, all politics aside, I really hope McCain doesn't win next week...I might be drawing him for the next four years.

the truth about the world

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being a fact among others.

Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy. The man is good, folks.

"Ignore the bleached remains of former expeditions..."

My good pals Storm the Castle! have released their EP, The History of Doomed Expeditions Vol. 1.

I can't recommend it enough.

You can order it here

My daughter knows her mythozoology

The Art of Sam Weber

For more greatness, please visit here

marilith

In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, a marilith is a powerful type of demon. In first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons mariliths were known as Type V demons. In 2nd Edition AD&D the name "Type V demon" was revised to "marilith".

The name marilith is a mash-up of Mara, a demon of doubt and temptation from the story of Gautama Buddha, and Lilith, a Mesopotamian storm demon that appears in the story of Gilgamesh as well as in the Book of Isaiah.

Lorenzo Mattotti's Hansel and Gretel

The story of Hansel and Gretel, as told in five drawings by Lorenzo Mattotti.

Mattotti is a master of color, but his black and white work is almost more incredible to me. These drawings are ridiculously great.