I don't know how big of a deal it is for most people, but I feel like there's a severe lack in comics of monsters that really make you feel small and insignificant when you witness them. They don't necessarily have to be Lovecraftian in nature because all that "incomprehensible to the human mind" shit is cheap, but what I'm talking about is just creatures that are too big for humans and actually feel like that not just form the way they're drawn but from the feel the story conveys. A big monster that the hero can fight just by shooting it or climbing on its back and stabbing it in a sensitive spot doesn't really convey the feeling of dread I get from something like pic related.
Let's take a moment to appreciate this shit, because when it's well done it's bloody well done.
Size and scope
Kaiju seem like the perfect fit for the kind of thing that I'm talking about. They're obviously living creatures, animals, and they don't have some kind of alien and incomprehensible motivations from beyond all human reason, yet they make you feel helpless and minuscule.
And then there's Celestials. These things make you feel small not just because they're drawn to be physically huge or because you can't just shoot them, but because the story treats them as somehow larger than life.
Does anyone get what I'm talking about? Is there like a word for this type of thing?
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Never read Doom Patrol, give us some context here.
Here is a short sequence from Prophet.
I notice that you like James Stokoe, OP.
He's not on this page, but you should know that he's one of the artists on Prophet.
This concludes your Daily Reminder to go read Prophet.
>Chicken Little was right
Kek
yeah, theyre cosmic alright. We at their wims
I remember when the fantastic four drilled into their bloodstream. At least that made them...real..i guess
Decreator, also known as Anti-God, the first shadow cast by God's light. Once awakened, it will unmake all existence.
source, by the way
dont tell me its "the end of the world"
BPRD Plague of Frogs.
BPRD. Hellboy worked there.
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Prophet picked up then.
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i read alot of that, actually. didnt get as far as THE END OF THE WORLD though
Gonna post some Ogdru Jahad and his children the Ogdru Hem
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That's actually just a vision, though. A vision that's steadily coming true because humanity is FUCKED
Anyone remember the issue number of Fables where a man retells the story of one of the little soldiers from the tiny Gulliver Travels island who were all alone until Thumbelina came along
And all the soldiers were at one another's throats to win over the lady
And so keep them from killing each other, one of the tiny soldiers climbed up a beanstalk to the land of giants to steal seeds to grow more Thumbelinas and thus save tiny people race.
I think Galactus was the first example of this in comics as a medium. Dude is so huge he gets to have his little herald interacting with people on his behalf but he's still something we can comprehend, he's just hungry.
No but I can imagine the difference between the giants and the people of Lilliput would be kind of difficult to convey on the page.
It is only a vision from the future but in Hell on Earth the Ogdru Hem roam free on Earth. Nuclear bombs were dropped on them, entire countries destroyed, millions dead and destruction worldwide as effect of their awakening; and its even getting worse...
BPRD is a lovecraftarian apocalypse
"That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."
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There's also Alec himself.
sounds like i need to get back into it!
Im always SCOURING the internet for comics like this, but skip over BPRD because "i know that one already"
cool!
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yup, hes a crazy god.
Remember that LCD Ragdoll guy?
Let me see if i can find it...
OP here, the reason I used that picture to start this thread is that BPRD is the series that made me realize my love for the whole concept. BPRD is THE shit, man. The escalation of horrible shit happening and the sheer helplessness the heroes begin to feel in the face of it is almost unique.
I say almost because Berserk is a thing.
cant find it, lol
do you have the page from swamp thing where they're walking on the spectre and it zooms out
yeah, i just remember it as a inner department drama. Cool stuff like finding a guy who lived on mushrooms for 40 years or something in a cave.
Dont remember any of THIS shit, lol
It's what Gotham gets for talking shit about his waifu.
That's because it escalates by degrees. One day they're fighting teddy bears that are coming to life, the next they're hunting frogs, the next day those frogs are a nation-wide epidemic, the next day South-East Asia doesn't exist anymore.
Don't take "day" literally here.
It's funny how Gotham went from the hellhole it normally is into a paradise on earth and all it took was a little flower power.
Here's him opening his eyes.
is this one where they called Lex Luthor and paid im for exactly ONE MINUTE of his time to come up with a plan to defeat Swamp Thing?
It was ten minutes, but he stopped ahead of time so they had time to write his check.
All of Hellboy is good. Abe Sapiens, BPRD and the other background titles. All of them give you an other view on the end of the world.
Cheers!
Ill take another look
Someone's storytiming it right now
You shouldn't be disappointed.
And away I go!
I think this sequence OP may like. Its from Zenith.
Chimera is a superhero project. A hybrid between ahuman and a multi-dimenional being.
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I feel like the Celestials are in some sense the opposite of Lovecraftian. They're towering, wast and unknowable, but they're also fundamentally of order. Lovecraft's creatures are defined by chaos and mindlessness, and fuck with his protagonists either on a whim, on instinct, or without their knowledge at all. The Celestials are defined by purpose, both in the agenda they carry out and in what they impose on lower beings like us. We don't know what that purpose is. We don't know where we're headed. All we know is that they are moving us, and that, at some point, it will have to end.
What is scarier, a universe which sees you as an ant and steps on you like one, or a universe which sees you as an ant and fancies itself an entomologist?
Also, the post-Gaiman Eternals series was pure bullshit.
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Is that thing actually turning into all of those other things or is it just creating illusions?
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It is becoming its own universe.
>What is scarier, a universe which sees you as an ant and steps on you like one, or a universe which sees you as an ant and fancies itself an entomologist?
It might indeed be better to be ignored than scrutinized.
Well that's kind of going too far. Size only has meaning when it has limits. The infinite is not in any way meaningful to me, I don't think.
The diffrerence between beings like Celestials and Great Old Ones are their origin.
While Azathoth is the primordial chaos and Hastur find its orgin as a multi-dimensional god. The Celestials were once beings like us. Kirby was inspired by 2001 when he created them. The Celestials are what we may become.
Additionally they represent something different. Lovecraft Horrors represent the thoughtless structure of the universe. While the God-Machines represent more the ultimate borders of sentience.
If there would ever be a war between these forces it would not only be a war of order and chaos; it would be a war between sentience and blindness.
I think the subsequent origin they gave Galactus really undermined his initial idea. It sort of turned him 'important' but small, if that makes sense. His continuing survival and MO was now justified by him being a part of the universal establishment, as opposed to him simply being the alpha predator of the cosmos who has no enemies capable of bringing him down.
It's a sort of cop out which also afflicted Darkseid a lot, I think.
I don't think it's a coincidence that when other writers moved away from what Kirby had conceived, the quality of the ideas dropped.
Come to think of it, Jack Kirby was fascinated by this stuff too, wasn't he?
>Galactus
>Celestials
>Ego the Living Planet
>Promethean Giants
He liked 2001 A Space Odysee. He even made the comic of it.
I think one of the 2001 sequels talked about "meteorological" life-forms on Jupiter. Little different from "what humanity can become", but I wish I'd have gotten to see those.
Pretty sure Kirby never wrote what the origin of the Celestials is. The charm of them is that they could be just highly advanced aliens, or they could be actual space gods in the literal sense.
In any case, I think Kirby's fascination with giant fucking aliens goes a lot deeper than just 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Galactus predates 2001 by a couple of years, right?
Two years. Ego, Kree, and the Inhumans also predate it. Interestingly they also predate Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? which came out the same year as 2001. So while the Eternals were influenced by these two books, Kirby was already moving in the same direction himself beforehand.
Another one for the Amazon list. Thanks, bros.