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!
