Monsters of the Dreadlands
My writing partner and I created a property we are currently pitching called DREADLANDS. Here’s the teaser:
Dreadlands is a dark, bloody, sword and sorcery western filled with a
tragic, twisted magic; a world forever stuck in the Old West, it’s only
technological growth the macabre workings of the “Tetched.”
At its core, Dreadlands is a twist on pure sword and sorcery; epic heroic adventure across a twisted version of the desolate, wild west. Horrific and bleak, six-guns meet dark magic and bloody adventure in this savage saga.
I’m not going to explain the “Tetched” here, that’s for later - hopefully for when you read the story, when the comic/graphic novel is in your eager hands. What you need to know for this blog is only this: we needed monsters.
Michelle and I created a few monster descriptions, and I discussed the creatures with my assistant, Lake, and enlisted him to do some exploratory design work.
How it works is like this: We write and discuss a character/creature with Lake. Then unleash him to jam out whatever concepts come into his super-creative mind. When he’s exhausted his initial ideas (sometimes after input from moi) I gather what he’s done and create a final design. Occasionally the final looks nothing like what he’s come up with, occasionally I barely alter anything at all - like with Lake’s concept for ‘Perry Peluda’ - see below.
It’s a super-helpful, creatively charged process.
Here’s a glimpse:
Description we wrote for:
Buffalo-based creature: Ol’Yati’ - it is a bastardization of the Lakota name for themselves (Pte Oyate(Ta-O-at-tay)- Buffalo Nation. Naming this monster this is exactly the racist crap these awful people would come up with.
Ol’Yati’ is a gigantic creature, twisted by extreme muscular development, steroid-ed out, rippling with veins, fur patchy, with seven heads, not all of them buffalo heads, a couple of them rolling, dead heads, all of them warped, half-buffalo/(half-human, antelope, bear????) and multiple limbs of different creatures coming out of its head/neck fur, some of them dead, none of it like the actual beast, all warped and twisted.
Description we wrote for:
Crazy Horse - Abomination gunslinger/bounty hunter.
Cross between human and horse. Weird skeletal horse head on a mostly human body.
Here is the amazing concept Lake presented that I based the final creature design on:
He
Here is the final Crazy Horse concept:
The description we wrote for:
Hairy Armadillo-based creature: She’s called Perry Peluda, (or some play on that), like it has a first and last name - it is bastardized Spanish for 'hairy bitch'.
Armadillo-ish skeletal head with massive teeth but clearly armadillo armor on a grotesquely female human-ish torso, on her torso there are several smaller, screaming armadillo-ish heads, her legs and arms are spindly, insanely long and disjointed, folding in backwards ways. Her hair, tufting from beneath armor plates, is more plant-like (see Mexican thread grass). She crouches on the desert sand and screams like a crowd of women.
This is Lake's concept - he really nailed this one - I didn't even change the pose!
Here is the final Perry Peluda character design:
It’s really been great working with Lake. He’s super-talented and I am certain that one day soon he will be a very successful concept artist - successful at whatever road he ends up traveling down.
I have an interesting connection to Lake - back in the day I would enlist his dad, Michael (one of my oldest and dearest friends), in much the same manner. Michael did a lot of preliminary design concepts on the early Ominous characters - one of his best - he came up with the distinctive horns/silhouette shape of the Dread Lord Omin’s helmet.
Ok, that’s a quick look at some original monsters from Dreadlands. So excited! Can't wait for all of you to see/read Dreadlands! Hope you enjoyed it and Keep Drawing!
He is the concept
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