I really love the expressions on the faces of these sea monsters from In the Wake of Sea Serpents

Angry, happy, frustrated or just kind of dopey looking, the drawings of various sea monsters used to illustrate various sightings throughout the many, many pages of Bernard Heuvelmans' In the Wake of Sea Serpents have such amazing, emotive expressions that I would often find myself pausing to regard them, struggling to imagine what the serpents must be thinking and feeling, and what the people who reported them making those expressions thought they must be thinking and feeling. It's a great book, and if you are at all interested in the sea, monsters, sea monsters, zoology and/or cryptozoology, you should definitely read it...although, if you are interested in any of those topics, chances are you've already read it (His On the Track of Unknown Animals is perhaps even more engaging, although it lacks so many wonderful drawings of sea monster expressions).

Another Mothman

This illustration of Mothman comes from Linda S. Godfrey's book American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends, and Sightings in America (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin; 2014). I scrutinized every corner of the book to see who the artist who provided the illustrations-which appear at the beginning of every chapter and thus give form to so many of the monsters mentioned within—but couldn't find a credit for the illustrator, who signed his or her work, but whose signature isn't quite legible. I then wondered if Godfrey herself provided the illustrations, and the signature does indeed seem to say Linda S. Godfrey, when one reads it with that in mind. So I'm 98% sure that the above is Godfrey's own drawing of the Mothman (I wish I knew Godfre illustrated the book herself while I was reading it, as I think that may have made me look a bit closer at the pictures).

How does her Mothman rate? Well, at first glance, it's obviously a rather silly-looking Mothman, much more "man" than anything else. He is apparently wearing some form of clothes, and what appears to be a bag over his head. The tight-fitting outfit, mask and posture made me thing most immediately of a professional wrestler, which gave the image a great deal of charm. Her Mothman has quite a bit of detail visible, including a few details that seem original to Godfrey's illustration—that is, not taken from any sighting literature—including the long, claw-like nails on the creature's five-fingered hands and five-toed feet. Actually, the existence of toes of any kind is something I don't recall ever being reported on at all.

Regardless, I think the image Godfrey provides could work as an illustration of the creature responsible for the sightings. Imagine that particular creature there in a very, very dark setting, so that all one could see was his silhouette. Now imagine his arms by his sides, and his wings folded closer to his body, so that the outline of the wings would absorb all the other details—what you'd be left with is the basic, heart-shaped black shape with red eyes seemingly coming from somewhere between its broad shoulders, and the mere suggestion of legs.

As well-lit as he appears in this drawing, that doesn't seem to be a very convincing Mothman, but in a darker environment, it works. And, as always, it's fascinating to see the different ways artists render this most mysterious character. Godfrey's take is definitely among the more unique ones we've seen so far.

A couple more Mothmans

I'm currently working my way through Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside (Visible Ink; 2011) by Brad Steiger and about 20 or so contributors, a big, thick book of stories about various "real" monsters.

There's a chapter entitled "Mothman—Harbinger of Death" about the Mothman, and there were two different illustrations of the subject.

There are a lot of illustrations in the book, and while I'm not terribly impressed with the visual elements of the book, I remain fascinated (to the point of obsessed, I guess) with the different ways different artists try to illustrate the highly abstracted creature, which was sighted scores of time, but which we still don't have a very clear "picture" of.

Here's the first, by Dan Wolfman Allen:It's an extremely accurate depiction of the composite descriptions: No face or head, big glowing eyes that resemble bicycle reflectors, huge wings, whether or not it has arms remaining vague and so on. Pretty detailed and remarkably buff legs, though.


Here's the second, by Ricardo Pustanio:He depicts the Mothman as particularly moth-like, which doesn't really jibe with the descriptions, but I guess if those big, buggy eyes glowed it could be seen as accurate. I guess it depends on what the rest of this Mothman looks like.

A few more Mothmans

This image, like the two below, were used as illustrations in the "Half man, half bird" chapter of Creatures From Elsewhere (Orbis Publishing; 1984): The book doesn't list the sources for individual images, and the image caption just reads, "Above: Mothman was said to lack any visible arms or head, to have luminous red eyes and huge wings, and to be bigger than a man." The above image is presumably a sketch based on a witness report.


Likewise, I have no idea who the artist of this illustration is, but it's one of the stronger ones I've encountered, as it manages to look scary, alien, vaguely moth-like and faithful to witness accounts: Somehow the fact that the creature is well-lit enough that we can see details on it, and see that it completely lacks all detail makes it even scarier. The little, shapely legs are kind of intriguing though; I can almost see that version of the monster dancing on them...


Finally, the chapter which includes a brief discussion of Mothman also includes a page or two on the Cornish Owlman seen in the late '70s by some English youths. The image below consists of three witnesses drawings of the creature they said they saw. Something about them, particularly the middle one, remind me of Johnny Ryan's work for some reason:

Not comics: Ben Patrick's illustrations for The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America

The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America (How; 2007) is one of those books that has such a strong book design that the design itself was enough to get me to pick it up off the shelf and give it a looksee (Grace Rign gets credit for the design). The conceit of the book is a rather simply one, and rather simply executed, but it's a fun one. As the back cover says, it's "Like a bird-watching guide...only for monsters."

The book is a tall, skinny rectangle (About 7.8-inches high and 4.6-inches wide), and author Scott Francis breaks it up into geographically defined ranges ("Monsters of the Northeast," "Monsters of the South," "Monsters of Canada," etc). Within each chapter, monsters are broken into seven categories ("Sasquatch and Hairy Monsters," "Flying Monsters," "Folklore Monsters, etc.), each with its own little icon/symbol (You can see these all on the cover...I espcially like the Sasquatch one). Francis offers other info as well, including an introduction explaining the hobby of monster-spotting (much safer than monster hunting), what tools you'll need, and some appendixes (one dealing with famous monster corpses, another giving a time line of North American monster history).

If you're looking for original or very specific information on the various cryptids and monsters that some believe share our continent, or some occasionally see on our continent, or folks told stories about on our continent, then this probably isn't the book for you.

Every monster in here I've heard of in another book, generally in much greater detail (As you may have noticed, I've been on a bit of a monster kick in my prose reading recently—Mothman Prophecies sent my reading in that direction, and I'm currently reading Loren Coleman's Mothman and Other Curious Encounters and re-reading Keel's Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings...many of the monsters in this guide are covered in both of those books).

That's not necessarily a failing of Francis' book, however. It's not that kind of book—the publisher's library subject suggestions are "monsters" and "folklore," and suggests the Dewey decimal number for folklore, but the bookstore shelving suggestion on the back cover is "pop culture/humor."

I think it works as a nice survey of American monster lore though, an easy-to-read, single-sitting introduction to a fairly massive monster menagerie that an interested reader can use as a springboard into more detailed reading. The "resources" appendix, for example, lists ten books—four by Coleman, two by Keel—and a dozen websites. Maybe springboard's not the best metaphor...The Monster Spotter's Guide is like a nicely-designed, well-furnished lobby at the entrance of the huge, labyrinthine complex that is the body of writing on the subject of monsters cryptozoological, mythological, paranormal and folkloric.

It's also full of illustrations, which is a large part of why I picked it up (You can read about The Flatwoods Monster of West Virginia, but it's so bizarre it's hard to actually "see" with one's mind), and why I'm bothering to write about it on a comics blog at all.

As a lifelong Ohioan (give or take a few years of college in Pennsylvania) with a lifelong interest in monsters (particularly those native to the Buckeye state!), I was excited to see that the book is the work of Ohioans. Francis was born in North Carolina, but currently resides in Cincinnati (Not to from Loveland, where the Frog Men live, or Dayton, where they keep the alien bodies), and Patrick is a native Ohioan.

So as we previously did with Rick Spears' illustrations for Tales of the Cryptids, let's take a closer look at Patrick's work.

He doesn't draw every single monster listed in the book—some of the lake serpents don't get full entries, let alone illustrations, perhaps due to how little some of the details change from example to example—but the bulk of them get drawings. Most of these are fairly simple black and white with little in the way of background, and the use of grays and lines sort of suggests pencil drawings, although many have very thick black lines.

Some aim for realism, like the Bessie image I'll post in a moment, or the second drawing of the Piasa Bird, which resembles a prehistoric monster more than the sphinx-like first drawing. Most lie somewhere between quick sketch and cartoon—albeit a more representational than expressive cartoon—reminding me of the sort of art I used to see in role playing game guide books (Yes, I used to be one of those people too).

I don't know that I'd run out and buy the book for the art—I borrowed it from a library, which is I suppose how I'd suggest interested readers first experience it—but as is probably obvious by now, I'm fairly fascinated with the way different artists present the same characters or creatures. However I may feel about the art or the subject, I like looking at drawings of things lots of other people have drawn before.

First, let's check out some of Patrick's drawings of some Ohio monsters.

Here's his Bessie, the Lake Erie sea monster that, in my limited experiences, seems to have more hoax and tourism-boosting sightings than real ones: Patrick gives it a Tyrannosaurus-like appearance, with which I can't quibble. Despite growing up—and currently living—on the coast of Lake Erie, I've never seen the beast, which is more locally known as South Bay Bessie and said to dwell further east, closer to Cleveland. She did inspire the name of the Cleveland-based minor league hockey team, the Lake Erie Monsters (they have a pretty sweet logo, by the way).

Here are Patrick's Loveland Frogmen, which look awfully froggy:


Other Ohio monsters covered are our old friend Orange Eyes and the Charles Mill Lake Monster of Mansfield, but neither of them get illustrations (presumably because of their Bigfoot-ishness, as there are several other big, hairy monsters illustrated already).

Next, let's look at my favorite of Patrick's drawings.

Here are his Devil Monkeys:If you've read many books on cryptozoology in the U.S., you've no doubt heard of the Devil Monkeys, which seem to reside in the overlap in a Venn diagram with "hairy humanoids" in one circle and "phantom kangaroos" in the other.

Accounts of them vary pretty wildly, but, in general, they seem sort of baboon-like, sort of kangaroo-like (particularly in their locomotion) and to be real dicks, attack cars and generally be pretty aggressive for animals that refuse to be caught or shot.

I like the ridiculousness of Patrick's version of them, where they literally have the heads of mandrills atop kangaroo bodies.

And here's The Mulberry Black Thing:It's a folkloric monster from Kentucky. It's a shape-changer, so Patrick depicts it in a state of potential, as any of three different forms simultaneously. It's a good way to approach the subject, and it also looks pretty weird and scary in that form.


Finally, I wanted to note Patrick's depiction of the Dover Demon. Another classic case of UFO lore and maybe-it-exists monster lore, the Dover Demon was only seen by a handful of witnesses on several nights in 1977 in Massachusetts. It's striking physical appearance is probably best known from these images:
Despite the demonic moniker, early theories as to just what the hell the creature actually was have gravitated toward some sort of UFO or alien explanation. Maybe it came from a flying saucer, or is some sort of ultraterrestial from a different dimension. Others have wondered if it might not be some sort of creature native to this world, as it bears some resemblance to the fairy-like, mythological Mannegishi of Cree legend. Among the more mundane explanations are that it was perhaps a misidentified newborn moose calf or, of course, a hoax.

Patrick's depiction of the Dover Demon implies another explanation for the creature's true identity:Obviously it was a ninja.

Follow-up: A few more Mothmans

Here's the Mothman in a detail from the cover of The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings (Doubleday; 1994) by John Keel:The illustration for this particular edition was drawn by Greg Dearth, so that's his take on Mothman.


And here's Rick Spears' illustration from the entry of Mothman in the "Cryptidictionary" section of the previously discussed Tales of the Cryptids: Mysterious Creatures That May or Many Not Exist (Darby Creek Publishing; 2006):


And here's Ben Patrick's illustration for the entry on Mothman in The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America (How; 2007), which apparently takes more inspiration from the name than the witness descriptions:



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Previously: "Off-topic: The Mothman Prophecies, and some thoughts on various depictions of its title character"

Off-topic: Quick Mothman follow-up

A book I would like to read but that doesn't, to my knowledge, exist yet is one about Point Pleasant, West Virginia today, and the way in which the community has apparently embraced Mothman. A sort of Mothman Prophecies Revisited, I guess.

The city's website looks like a pretty standard small municipality's website, and it doesn't make a huge deal out of Mothman, the only reference I can find being a link to the Mothman Museum.

Of course, they do have a Mothman Museum. (My hometown is the site of one of the greatest railroad disasters in history, and we don't have a museum, just a monument where the unrecognized dead are buried and a plaque near the site.)

There's a small town near my hometown known for its wineries and grapes, and they have a grape festival once a year. Circleville, Ohio, which is about 40 minutes south of Columbus, has a pumpkin festival once a year. And Point Pleasant apparently now has an annual Mothman festival, complete with a Miss Mothman Pageant.

Apparently what was a series of strange to scary to tragic events a generation ago is now kitschy fun, and Mothman is to Point Pleasant as pumpkins are to Circleville.

The reason I bring this up is that the previous discussion of different depictions of Mothman got me thinking about the ways various artists have chosen to depict a creature of which barely any details exist, and is essentially little more than a pair of red eyes on a big, gray shape.

More often than not, moth-like details are added to the creature when it comes time for an artist to draw it, dictated by the creature's name. The name was apparently given to it by an Ohio newspaper writer, riffing on 1966's Batman TV show, despite the fact that Mothman has no more in common with moths than wings and a habit of appearing outdoors at night. (Although at least one sighting noted that the eyes were like bike reflectors, which perhaps suggested the compound eyes of an insect to some artists...?)

Anyway, if anyone was going to have an accurate depiction of Mothman—that is, one that resembles the reports of sightings of the creature rather than the image the name evokes—you would think it would be the city of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. And yet when they erected a statue of Mothman, they went with a moth-like, humanoid monster, which has eyes and wings like the Mothman of the historical record has, but is otherwise all wrong.

(Not that there's anything wrong with it being "all wrong," of course; the statue is a tourist attraction and part of a fun celebration of the community's notoriety, not an attempt to accurately represent a phenomenon—that's not what statuary's for, really).

You can see a partial image of the statue above. There are more pictures here (and there's a visitor's gallery here). It's sculpted out of stainless steel by Robert Roach.

As with the Frazetta image, accuracy aside, I kind of like the design. Roach's Mothman resembles some sort of Japanese monster, of the kind that Godzilla or a Godzilla knock-off would end up fighting. Mecha-Mosurajin.

It seems awfully detailed though...surely the headless, tapering winged blob with red-eyes would have been easier to sculpt than this mouth-having, six-pack abs-possessing metal monster.

Off-topic: The Mothman Prophecies, and some thoughts on various depictions of its title character

I have been meaning to read John A. Keel's The Mothman Prophecies for a long time now; ever since I'd first heard about it, really, which I guess makes it somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years or so. I've been encountering Mothman pretty regularly ever since I was old enough to start reading grown-up books, as he's a pretty unique character in cryptozoology, UFOlogy, modern monster lore, Fortenalia and the like, and would always turn up in various encyclopedias on such topics.

I was both really attracted to such subjects and extremely repelled by them when I was growing up, the usual pattern being that I would be excited to read about them during the daylight, and then be terrified all night and wish I hadn't read about them, and then the next day the cycle would repeat. Mothman seemed particularly scary to me, as it seemed pretty likely he was tied up with UFOs and space aliens, and that stuff used to just plain scare me silly. Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Jersey Devil—I could generally deal with that stuff, even at night, knowing I was unlikely to find any of 'em in small town Ohio (or medium-sized town Pennsylvania, or big-town Ohio), but aliens? They could pretty much appear wherever, paralyze you or whatever and then abduct the fuck out of you, and what could you do about?

That's right. Nothing.

So I was more scared of Mothman than a lot of the other monsters usually found in his menagerie, and I was scared a little longer, as when I hit adolescence I began to realize it was logically pretty silly to be scared of, say, a dinosaur scooping me out of my bedroom window if I was upstairs alone, or bumping into a Bigfoot in the hallway at night when I went to the bathroom, but maybe I could still go crazy and think I saw Mothman or a Gray Alien or the Dover Demon or something, right? Irrational fear, hallucinations and a lack of control seemed to be a big part of the Mothman anecdotes I had read.

On the other hand, despite the fact that Mothman HQ Point Pleasant is in West Virginia, it's just on the other side of the Ohio river, and the monster didn't seem to observe state geography, appearing on both sides of the rivers. So Mothman is, technically, one of ours too, so as an Ohioan I've always felt a niggling duty to read about that scary son-of-a-bitch. Eventually. When I was a grown-up. Say, in my thirties.

So the last time I was in the Mentor Public Library, perusing the 00's of the Dewey decimal system for books I haven't read about lake monsters and Bigfoots (I've been devouring this stuff a lot over the past decade since now I can do so with no fear of being up all night scared silly...another of the many advantages of adulthood!), I was somewhat surprised to find an original, hardcover of the book from 1975 (Thirty-five years without being discarded from a public library collection?!).

Like I said, I've been meaning to read this book forever, but it was the cover that really sold it to me.

Check it out: There's no credit for who drew the image, but there is one crediting Peter Parnall with the jacket design, so I assume he's responsible for it.

I liked how incredibly different it is from the Mothman depiction I'm most familiar with, the one that usually shows up in encyclopedias of the strange:That's a drawing based on witness descriptions, and is part of the Fortean image library. Having now read The Mothman Prophecies, I know that there is extremely little known about it's appearance...in fact, the "new" information I learned from the book regarding its appearance was simply that there was no additional information about its appearance that I hadn't seen quoted elsewhere.

It was big, between around six-feet at the smallest and 12 feet at the tallest. It was gray in color...or sometimes brown or black. It had huge, red, glowing eyes that were sometimes described as being like bike reflectors, or like lamps, and unlike the eyes of deer, raccoons and the like when light reflects off them in the light. It apparently had no head, or at least no neck. It had a huge wingspan of ten-feet, which isn't really very big at all if the creature was actually six-feet tall or taller, which it kept folded along its back. It had two legs, and stood upright, and when it walked on them it shuffled, or waddled or, in one instance, glided along the ground. When it flew, it's wings didn't move. And no one saw its face, or, if they did, they couldn't describe it, beyond such vagaries as "no mouth" or "no beak" or "a science fiction face" or simply being too terrible to describe.

Put it all together, and it sounds to me like a gigantic owl with crazy eyes that flies like a spaceship.

The above image from the Fortean image library does accurately fit the descriptions of all the witnesses. Here's what I came up with:Depending on how tall it was, with its wings out I guess it would have to look either sorta like thisor like this So the cover of the book above is really rather endearing in its depiction of the title character: A humanoid body, arms ending with hands and fingers, a human-looking butt, feathers, bat-like wings sprouting from it's back so that it has six limbs instead of the more standard four. And then there's that head. The head is inspired. It may just be an accident, given how little the rest of the creature resembles anything mentioned in the Keel's book, but it accounts for the fact that the monster seemingly had no head and/or no neck, while still giving him a head and neck. It's just shaped really weirdly.

Me being someone who was born in the late seventies, the head of course reminded me of this guy from Star Wars, of course, the Mothman cover predates the cantina scene in Star Wars by two years.

Anyway, I thought it was a pretty cool cover. I also like how Mothman's sort of sneaking around too, like he's either going to peep on that young couple in the background while they make out (a significant number of modern American monsters seem to have voyeurism kink), or he's hiding from them while they go looking for him, which seems like a sort of silly thing for them to be doing, since he's a giant monster man.

Now curious about depictions of Mothman, I spent some time looking around for other versions of the cover Keel's original book on the subject.

Here's the one that I suppose is now the standard one:It's fairly similar to the movie poster for the 2002 film "adaptation" starring Richard Gere, and is an enormously unappealing design. There's nothing about the image that grabs me, or tells me anything about what the book is about.

Also, the tagline "based on true events" doesn't seem like great salesmanship. The edition I read had no such qualifier, and was presented as a true story, with the only room for wiggling being that Keel himself was being manipulated or hallucinating certain things—the bulk of it consists of him recording what other people are telling him, which don't have to be presented as objectively true, so long as they're all cited as things he was told rather than things he personally knew to be true.

Here's one I found on Goodreads.com; the publication information is identical to that of the version I posted the cover of above, but the cover's quite different: Accurate, sure, but not very sexy (Er, accurate in that it has some people looking up on it, as occurs a lot in the book; obviously neither of those figures there is supposed to be Mothman). I can't imagine a gray image of a couple pointing at the small, white font on the cover really leapt off the shelves in 1975 any better than it does now.

Sexiness isn't a problem with the cover of this paperback version, however. Behold, the power of Frank Frazetta: Here's a better look at it:
Okay obviously this isn't a very accurate depiction of what goes on in the book. Sure, there's a big guy with big red eyes and wings, and some flying saucers, and a man and a woman, but the Mothman looks more like a Japanese superhero with butterlfy wings, and that couple sure doesn't look much like John Keel and the Mary Hyre he describes in the book.

It sure is a striking image though, and I can imagine it moved a lot of paperbacks. The central focus on the weird figure and his butterfly wings make the image stand out even among other Frazetta images that you'd see on paperbacks.

And that's about it for Mothman Prophecies covers.

Loren Coleman's 2002 book Mothman and Other Curious Encounters uses a version of the witness-inspired look, as seen in the drawing from the Fortean gallery near the top of the post, on its cover:It was created by artist William Rebsamen, based on witness descriptions, under Coleman's supervision.

Keel's follow-up book, 1976 Visitors From Space: The Astonishing, True Story of the Mothman Prophecies, features what has to be the least accurate depiction so far:Even Frazetta's had red eyes. This dude looks like he's just passing over Visitors From Space, having just left a heavy metal album cover and on his way to a Dungeons & Dragons source book.

Here's a portion of one of the only images of Mothman I have sitting around my house, from 2005's Weird Ohio's chapter on "Bizarre Beasts": It's by Cathy Wilkins, who contributed a couple of monster paintings to Weird Ohio (and whose work you can find here). It's another very moth-y version...clearly the name dictates the portrayal more often than not.

And, finally, I don't have a copy of Fantagraphics' Beasts! Book 2 on hand to scan, but artist Jon Vermilyea contributed a two-page spread featuring Mothman—
—which you can find on his site here. Rest assured it looks much better in person.

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As for the Mothman Prophecies book itself, I had a lot of fun reading it, and had trouble putting it down—I think I finished it in two, maybe three sittings tops. Keel's a fine writer, and comes across as someone with a very healthy amount of both skepticism and credulity, neither dismissing all of the crazy stuff he hears and experiencse nor taking it all at face value.

The book is still enormously unsatisfying though, in large part because it amounts to little more than a collection of anecdotes, with each chapter being broken up into little sub-chapters marked by roman numerals. It seemed part Fortenalia and part memoir, and while Keel searched for connections between a ton of seemingly unrelated (except by setting, geographical and temporal) phenomena, he never really comes up with anything definitive, or even a good theory.

It's especially frustrating because as the book nears its end, he mentions being in daily contact with the entities—the weird, awkward "men in black" characters that populate the book—through a variety of means:

I could ask [Mr. Apol, one of the men in black Entities] any kind of obscure question and receive an instant and accurate answer, perhaps because my own mind was being tapped just like my telephone. Where was my mother's father born? Cameron Mills, New York, of course. Where had I misplaced my stopwatch? Look in the shoebox in the upper right-hand corner of the bedroom closet (it was there).

Why he doesn't ask what's up with the big, gray winged creature or all the UFOS or where the MIBs were from or what they were doing exactly is never explained.

And his unified theory of the craziness of West Virginia and Long Island at the time is mentioned only in passing, never presented as, like, an answer to the questions this book is a chronicle of his investigation of.

After reading this, I have no real sense that Keel learned anything or had anything to share from his experiences; rather it's a long laundry list of crazy shit. Which is a lot of fun, of course, but I guess I was expecting something more. Maybe I have to read the follow-up for that?

I found a few things particularly noteworthy:

—Keel dismisses the two most obvious vague explanations for all the crazy phenomena he, his partner Mary Hyre and everyone else in the book experiences (Mothman sightings, lights in the sky, encounters with aliens, men in black who behave strangely, strange phone calls, cattle mutilation, electrical and appliance malfunctions). He thinks neither aliens nor the government are at all responsible, which actually kind of blew my mind. Space aliens with the technology to get here would presumably have the technology to commit all of the acts of strangeness he recounts, and if we want to be generous towards the U.S. government's capabilities and less-than-generous in our assessment of their scruples in the mid-sixties, then they would at least have the money to attempt some sort of huge thought experiment to discredit UFO researchers while testing out, I don't know, fear guns and telephone disruptors or even war-gaming mass UFO sightings.

His own theory seems no more or less wild: That the entities are from a higher dimension and are clumsily interacting in our own, either to guide humanity in a particular direction, or else just fucking with humanity for reasons they themselves don't understand. That, or it's all some sort of psychic phenomena that we don't understand yet, and people interpret their experiences within contexts they do understand. I could buy that last one easily enough, but Keel doesn't seem to be trying to sell it here.

—The Men In Black encounters seem downright disturbing in isolation, but taking all together like this, they seem almost...wacky. And once you decide they are neither agents of the government or aliens of some kind, they even appear a bit silly, like a conspiracy with no purpose other than to appear conspiratorial.

—It was awfully hard to put myself in Keel's place in most of these scenes, simply because times have changed so much since 1967. Hardly anyone seems suspicious of anyone else—nowadays a stranger comes up to talk to you, the first thing you assume is that he's probably going to mug, rape and or kill you, whereas the folks in the book are always inviting strangers into their homes, cars and personal space. And, of course, there's the technology. I grew up before the Internet and cellphones were parts of every day life, but it's still hard for me to imagine things like tampering with the mail or phone lines. There's a scene where Keel tries to follow his phone line from his apartment all the way back to the phone company to see if anything's wrong with it at any point along it's length, and I could barely follow the scene. (It makes me pretty curious to see the movie version now though, as I understand it's set in modern times).

—It was pretty weird reading about pre-Communion alien/UFO contact and abduction experiences. There are a ton of aliens in this that appear to be perfectly human-looking, and many of them speak English, have Earth-like names and come from planets and stars I've heard of. Keel mentions more sinister abduction experiences, but only lays out one in any great detail, and the aliens involved sound awfully different than the flat-faced, almond-eyed ones I grew up reading about/being scared of. These hostile aliens were gray and short, but they had wrinkly skin, pointed ears and crab claws for hands.

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Anyway, that's more than enough talking about things-that-aren't-actually-all-that-comics-related. If any of you have suggestions of any comic book appearances by Mothman—I know he appeared in Cryptozoo Crew, and I assume he's had to show up at some point in Proof and The Perhapanauts, for example—please let me know in the comments section.

Not comics: Rick Spears' illustrations for Tales of the Cryptids

During my recent visit to the Mentor Public Library, I found Tales of the Cryptids: Mysterious Creatures That May or Many Not Exist (Darby Creek Publishing; 2006) shelved right where the title page suggests it be shelved in libraries that use the Dewey decimal system—001.94, with the cryptozoology books. Oddly, it was in the adult non-fiction section, under about two whole shelves of UFO books and next to a couple of Bigfoot books, all save one of which I'd already read (The one I hadn't already read and thus also checked out was Jeff Meldrum's Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, which is a so science-y it can be awfully dry in certain chapters, but is interesting nonetheless).

This is odd simply because it is very much a kids book. The title page even recommends it be shelved as such. It's a 72-page hardcover book about the size and shape of your average picture book, and while there isn't a whole lot on each subject, authors Kelly Milner Halls, Rick Spears and Roxyanne Young provide a pretty thorough overview of Cryptozoology. It's a pretty great introduction to the topic—I would have loved it when I was in grade school—but grown-ups who have read much on the subject probably won't find too much in here the haven't heard before.

After a few pages explaining what cryptozoology is, the book breaks into chapters. Each begins with a scene-setting "Imagine...a night as dark as it is quiet..." page fictionalizing a theoretical encounter with something or other, and then presents a world map of sightings of a particular group of animals, and a bunch of short, one or two-page articles on various subjects under the umbrella of that group, with lots of pictures, sidebars and short interviews with real-life investigators and experts.

These chapters include ones on Bigfoot-type creatures, sea monsters, prehistoric cyptids, and cryptic mammals, and, the most interesting part for me, a "Cryptidictionary" section.

This is a 12-page section at the back of the book, with each page having four or five entries on various cryptids, giving each a paragraph of text, a "reality index" rating from "real" to "hoax," and a black and white drawing by Spears. Those drawings are what I'm most interested in for the purposes of this piece, but I should note that if you're interested in the subject matter and do run across this books, it may be well worth a flip-through for more than just art appreciation. I did learn a few things, including having heard of a few cryptids I'd never heard of before (Georgia river monster the Altamaha-ha, The Piasa Bird), and learned about a fantastic artist I had never heard of before, Sarina Brewer, who creates Feejee Mermaids, chimeras and other strange sculptures out of a combination of taxidermy and, I assume, magic (Do take some time to check out all the galleries on her site...there's an awful lot to see there).

The book is heavily illustrated with a ton of photographs and charts and maps and other visuals, but among all that visual clutter are some very nice drawings by Rick Spears (Who, I should note, is not the Rick Spears responsible for Teenagers From Mars and Black Metal, but instead a Georgia-based illustrator and builder of museum models and exhibits).

Spears provides black-and-white sketch-like illustrations of each of the cyrptids who have entries in the "Cryptidictionary," and these seem to be quite purposefully drawn to resemble quick sketches, as if Spears were a police sketch artist interviewing a witness about what the Jersey Devil he saw looked like, or perhaps he himself were hiding in the bushes trying to record what the Nandi Bear looked like before it disappeared into the shadows.

Spears' work is the only true visual throughline for the book, and it's a treat to see so many vastly different animals and creatures filtered through a single style. They all seem to belong together, which I suppose makes them feel a little more real (That is, they're all made of the same stuff, they all share a similar weight and relation to the artist). Likewise, I enjoyed seeing extremely familiar images recreated from photos or film into Spears' sketchy style. For example, that rotting corpse that looked like a plesiosaur that a Japanese fishing boat pulled up, or the Dover Demon, or Florida globster or Cardiff giant.

Also fun was observing the choices Spears made in differentiating groups of monsters that share a great deal in common. For example, there are about ten different sea-going reptilian sea monsters/serpents in the 'dictionary, and he gives them each various details so that no two look alike. If there are lake monsters, it would be reasonable to assume that The Loch Ness Monster, Ogopogo, Champ, Caddy and their lesser-known ilk are all different instances of the same time of unknown creature, but Spears draws them each as if they were their own species. I particularly liked his Nessie, which sports giraffe-like horns. Simply put, it doesn't look like any Loch Ness Monster I've ever seen, and that's pretty exciting.

To illustrate this, check out Spears' various hairy hominid types. Again, each of these creatures are, if real at all, likely close relatives, but Spears gives each its own look. In addition to Bigfoot, who is represented in the dictionary by a drawing of a footprint (and on the cover as the traditional Patterson-Gimlin style of striding ape-man), here are Spears' Bigfoot-types:











Those are, in order, a Sasquatch, a yeti, an orang-pendek, the skunk ape, the Australian Yowie and the Chinese Yerren.

Just a couple of subtle differences here and there make a really big difference in giving each their own look, huh?

Here's a just plain bad-ass looking monster, "The Owlman of England," which looks significantly cooler and scarier than the firsthand reports I've read of those sightings (or any of the owl men I've seen in Western pop culture):

Perhaps my favorite drawing of Spears' in the book, however, is of the cryptid referred to in the dictionary as the "U-28 Sea Monster." I had coincidentally just heard of this dude a couple weeks ago while reading Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe's Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep.

Here's how Tales tells this poor sea monster's tale:

When the German U-boat known as U-28 torpedoed the World War I British steamer Iberian, it sank more than its human enemies...survivors...saw a sixty-foot-long creature "writing and struggling wildly" as it took to the air more than one hundred feet up—the result of of the Germans' explosion.

Yes, this monster's only appearance was as a casualty of an underwater explosion. I like the weirdness of this story, which just seems so weird that it almost kind of has to be true—if anyone was going to make up a story about a sea monster sighting, why would you set your made-up sighting in the middle of an explosion? There's something appealingly slapstick about this story too; I guess it's the sea serpent equivalent of someone saying they saw Bigfoot, but they saw him just as he stepped on a landmine and incinerated himself.

Anyway, I love the way Spears depicts this monster:

Finally, since I'm an Ohioan, and I know at least some of you are also Ohioans, I'd be remiss if I didn't include Spears' illustrations of our fellow Ohioans, The Loveland Frog or Frog Men.

For more info on the Loveland Frogs, here's a Cryptomundo post, and here's a site entitled The Loveland Frog Project. In short, there were several sightings of what appeared to be reptilian humanoids with frog-like heads in Loveland, Ohio (near Cincinnati), occuring in the spring of 1955 and again in the spring of 1972. The original sighting was made by a businessman who said he saw three bipedal reptile-like creatures on the side of the road. When he stopped to investigate and got too close, one of them held up a wand that began to spark.

So here's Spears' Loveland Frog, which garners a rating of "unknown" on the reality index: