This monster was a combination of two things: my desire to have more sound-based monsters and my urge to model something after the grideye, a real life deep sea fish with bright yellow pits instead of eyes. I exaggerated these a great deal for this design and added the bony "struts" inside, and I think the result is fairly eerie looking but could have stood to be a bit more detailed, shaded and highlighted; maybe I'll touch this one up soon.
I went through many, MANY ideas for the rest of the body, mouth and limbs. I often default to a simple quadruped or humanoid despite my love of weirder creatures, and I think that's often because I feel a more "ordinary" body helps to bring out a monster's stranger facial features. I think in this case, I avoided the normal quadruped anatomy but still kept the body simple enough not to distract too much from the focus of the skull structure.
I also opted for a kind of cute, mammalian, and toothless mouth because Mortasheen has more than enough fangs, suckers, mandibles and "zombie jaws" by now.
Spots, stripes and exotic color patterns are also something I've really neglected in this setting, not taking near enough advantage of how absurd the colors can get in real reptiles, amphibians, birds or insects. I didn't do much on this one but add some reticulation and spots; I hope to do some future monsters with bolder patterns, or even go back and mess with some existing ones.
One of the first "patients" ever actually designed, the Broken Skull is also one of the few with eyes, since I decided a patient-creature cannot have any body parts that wouldn't normally be connected directly to its main focus. Both the skull and the brain as well as the eyeballs are all part of this same "broken skull" concept entity, but of course we've also seen an unrelated eyeball being. Somewhere out there are other brain beings as well, and of course probably other skull beings and even skull-brain and brain-eyeball combos.
Broken Skull is slow moving like a snail, but has a desire to go fast, which is all part of the symbolism of some terrible accident in which someone PROBABLY should have been wearing a helmet. In fact, this kind of began as a design for a *ghost,* the ghost of someone who died about how you might expect.
I've never one so much artwork and writing in a single month before, but a lot of it is for stuff you can't see yet! Thanks for being patient as I made a lot of new kinds of content this past month, but at the cost of some of my more usual content. For the next couple months I'll be going back to Awful Hospital, Mortasheen, and Patreon requests, which you can put in right here for October and any others I owe you!
Appearing on page 919 of Awful Hospital, Anna made her first appearance in the "Doctor Dementist" creepypasta, and a big part of me still prefers both her and Dementist to be wholly unexplained. I was never even sure if I really wanted them to be part of Awful Hospital's canon, but I don't think I could have gotten away with leaving any of the weirdo doctors out. It's challenging, fleshing them out while still trying to keep them bizarre and mysterious.
Anna is the manifestation of the Hospital's anesthetic gas, which as explained in the comic works by basically elevating the patient's perception. Just like "laughing gas," they feel like they're somewhere else and experience anything but what's merely happening to their body.
When Fern received a single puff of the gas, she experienced its full effects for about one layer, or one page of the comic - the trippy hallucinatory vision she initially saw of Willis and Isaac. Since then, the gas has worn off over the course of eight pages with Fern becoming more cognizant but still "not all there."
Though Anna's gas (which is also Anna, basically) is used throughout the hospital, she only manifests her core form in the Dental ward, and is basically afraid of everyone and everything other than Dementist. They are extremely close, but it's neither a romantic nor platonic relationship exactly; it's something on a level humans don't really experience, almost like they're part of the same being.
The slimy tongue is a recent addition to make her just a bit more disturbing, seeing as that has to go over your mouth and nose to keep you on the gas. However, I opted for her to just "spray" gas in Fern's face, rather than latch on - it would just be a bit too unwholesome to have that happen to Fern.
Requests that are HALLOWEENY ENOUGH and can constitute a longer article will also be *considered* for the main Halloween articles this month, if there's room!
This was in fact a scrapped character I almost put in the comic's earliest arc but I'm just gonna quietly make him canon again behind the scenes, along with his weirder cousin.....both based on real CPR training dummies.
I didn't expect to spend what is now THREE solid weeks working on our move to a new apartment, in addition to what I've managed to update for Awful Hospital and my Halloween articles. I also have another new job and some really exciting stuff going on, but I'll be doing your requests for this month soon, along with more for September, and I'll be doing an extra load of Mortasheen as well. I'll do my best to get another Mort-a-ween going, and this year, I'm going to try and make it Joker themed.
This is an idea for a semi-gelatinous, semi-siliceous bottle-like monster filled with sweet smelling poison.
I'm also leaning towards making it a joker. I actually have a lot of new joker concepts, but none of them are clown themed; they include things like candy, toys, "cartoon character" monsters and others unified mostly by the fact that they're all "silly" or "funny" things turned into gas-filled monsters. I think the main running theme of the jokers is really that they weaponize "fun." The clown-like hive emits gases that make you laugh at their pranks and antics. Other hives and rogue jokers might take different approaches!
If I haven't done one of your past sketch requests, it's because it's one of the ones that is still turning out so bad by my standards, I wind up doing it over later! So, new requests as well as alternative requests always welcome! Some of you also get creature review requests for the site!!
The "Boo Men" were actually one of my oldest, pre-Mortasheen concepts, but almost none of the originals survived into their Mortasheen incarnation. They were named after an opening chapter in the "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" book series, which in turn was said to be an obscure, older way of saying "Boogieman."
The original idea of the Boo Men, from my long-defunct horror/fantasy/scifi setting, was simply a band of elite monster assassins who each had a different signature killing method, which was also their name. This HAS survived into the Mortasheen version, though as a rule, Mortasheen's Boo Men are humanoid so that they don't just feel like any other monster. My original Boo Men included a few nonhumanoids just to really play with the "men" moniker, one of them even being nothing but a faceless, stone block and another a virus.
Braek is based obviously on Ed Roth's artwork, most famous for Rat Fink and other scuzzy monsters who were intertwined with hot rod culture. Braek is similarly obsessed with speed, and basically a "biker," but is also her own bike. She was also an attempt to do a female humanoid monster that wasn't visually coded as feminine in any way, though I guess she does have kind of an hourglass waist.
I always liked the look of those biker helmets with the spike on top, but they have some negative cultural associations and I already used them anyway for the War Bird line many years ago, so I turned it into a long lance-like horn she can use as a weapon. It also becomes her "nose" when she flips the helmet down over her eyes.
I really want to redo the look of her tire someday, which I think just doesn't look good at all.
This art looks so incredibly old and bad to me now! Jeez!
"Tori" first began as a concept for the hospital nurses, who were in turn homages to Silent Hill's "sexy monster nurse" tradition, though I wanted to go slightly weirder than their faceless mannequins and stuff.
When I decided to have biohazard waste bag characters, I decided they worked better as the Hospital nurse staff, and the circulatory system was upgraded to a doctor.
Her tiny peanut brain, spork, and googly eyes were meant to imply she was not at all fit to be doing surgery, but of course she is actually a genius and one of the most competent doctors. The eyes move independently to collect more visual information, like a chameleon, and....she put the peanut there because she thought her hollow, see-through head was what distressed grey zone patients.
Of course, this isn't her true form anyway; the real Tori is a giant, artificial heart, controlling a circulatory system as an extension of her body. She grew her son Willis from this as an experiment, making him a fully biological hospital staff offshoot.
I decided she'd also be an artist in her off time, both because it's cute and because surgery is sometimes likened to an art form, with many everyday skills being relevant to both.
As to why she has the shape that she has, well, yes it is fun to draw characters shaped this way, but I try to do it sparingly because it's such a cliche. In-universe, it might just be how grey zoners see her, but I don't know, she might just like it is all. She can change it into any shape she wants, and she can form many more "bodies" as she pleases; they are basically just puppet appendages.
I ran out of room unpredictably so Brak wound up with an arm behind Zorak and now they're drinking together....but Brak didn't really even get anything alcoholic. He is like that.
