I knew I wanted to practice making babies.
No, that’s not a cry for
attention; just hear me out. One of the things that I hate more than anything
is talking baby movies. And even more hellfire is spewed from my voicebox when
I’m forced to watch CGI-baby commercials or commercials featuring babies doing
adult activities. Looking at those dumb fake CGI baby heads hovering above
their dumb bodies doing dumb real activities like e-mailing and drinking coffee
has the same unsettling effect on my appetite as it would if those CGI baby
heads were Billy Crystal’s current head stuck on the body of my wet dog. It’s
disgusting. So, because I like putting myself in stressful, uncomfortable
situations when being creative, I thought, “Hey, self, why not embrace what you
hate, and draw talking babies.”
Plus once I thought about it, drawing babies and thinking of babies as
serious characters could be really funny. Baby bodies are puffy and silly and
odd and innocent and, if needed, creepy.
But the whole baby business is still in progress. So let’s move on to
what I decided on for an actual origin of the “Thunder Babies”, which is the
name I decided to go with before I challenged myself to build a world around it.
Given that I only have 30 days to do this (I'm friends with the skinny guy from The Running Man and I had a collar made so that my head explodes if I don't finish), I
knew I didn’t have a lot of time to figure out what I wanted the direction of
Thunder Babies to be, and I knew that whatever decision I made last night would
dictate my life for the next 28 days. That being said, I didn’t want to
overthink the idea because ultimately it will be a work in progress until day
30, but I also didn’t want to just go full force with the first idea that popped in my
head, because I believe that everything should be thought about AT LEAST twice
before commitment, otherwise you end up with something like TUSK, Bubble Gum Soda or that upcoming sitcom about VINE celebrities. Not that Thunder Babies is
going to be any better than Tusk, but I have to try.
Using the “Thunder Babies” name by itself for
inspiration, I went through a few phases:
1. Genetically modified babies existing on an island named “Thunder
Island”. OK, fine, but who made them, why were they made, etc.? Even though no children
ever really questioned who/what/why the Smurfs existed, Peyo (the artist
creator of the Smurfs) knew that shit going into it because it added a backbone
to any story he wanted to tell within that world. Backbones are important. OK,
so I had to think then, why would there be an island of genetically modified
babies on an island?
Maybe there’s a sad planet (called Sadurn!?) who was lonely and so it used its
gravity to pull in passing ships in hopes of making friends, but its gravity
kept pulling them in too hard and crashing and killing them. Until one person
survived, who was a genetic scientist, and in turn offered to “MAKE” friends
for this planet in exchange for letting him escape the lonely-gravity-pull of
the planet. That COULD HAPPEN!
That was my first attempt, but I knew that that was reaching, when all I ultimately wanted was a simpler reason to just draw weird babies. So I scratched that, and started over. This morning.
2. I DID like the idea of a living planet. Not “living” in a sense of
just being able to sustain life, but more in an “EGO, The Living Planet” way,
or, in even simpler terms, like the sun on Teletubbies. I wanted to keep that.
Then I started thinking of random ideas that I have had in the past that I
never fleshed out, and one of them that I always wanted to do something with
(maybe it even HAS been done before) was the idea of finding out that Earth is
pregnant and is slowly going into labor, with earthquake’s being contractions,
volcanoes being morning sickness, etc. I not only liked the idea of an eventual
giant baby monster emerging from the actual core of the earth, but I liked
thinking about HOW it got pregnant, and thinking about an even bigger monster
having sex with it long before we were alive. So I decided to pull from those
ideas, and add the words “Thunder Babies” into the mix and decided that the
Thunder Babies would be the result of a planet getting impregnated by Zeus.
That makes a lot more sense to me.
So I wrote up a quick history of the birth ofthe Thunder Babies, and just to have a visual introduction to go along with it,
I decided I needed to draw a drunk Zeus fucking the dying planet in the middle
of space.
I started scribbling, and I kept picturing a
drunk Zeus to just look like DOG the Bounty Hunter, and I quickly realized that
I don’t know how to properly have sex with a planet, nor do I know what a classic
generic Zeus was supposed to look like, so I started pulling some reference
photos which FINALLY gave me a reason to type in “Watermelon sex” into Google.
Which, by the way, led me to discover the amazing art of Watermelon carving!!!!
SO COOL!
Look how cool!
So after multiple terrible sketches, I settled
on moving the leg and that made his position flow a lot better in my opinion.
It’s not the best, but at least I have some experience the next time a job
calls for an old man fucking a circle. OK, back to work! THUNDER BABIES!!!!!!
