Here is a detail from a sketchbook page that shows my first drawing of “Spluhh, the Thing who Burst from an Exploding Volcano!” It’s from the only page of a dozen mostly-very-loose preparatory sketches I did before diving straight into creating the published pages for Doris Danger, which Dick Ayers inked.
Below this detail is the full page of this first and only prelimary sketch work I did, before just jumping in and drawing direct-on-the-page, the Doris Danger comics that were published. Notice the head sketches were really not Jack Kirby looking at all. They were my early studies for creating Kirby-style monsters, but not in style – in exploring head shapes, eye and mouth and fur or horn placement. Kirby made so many great giant monsters, I was looking for “the magic one” for my story and just quickly jotted down with a stream-of-conscious head-eyes-mouth exercise. You can see I started with a sort of Gossamer from Bugs Bunny (see below). After zipping out a number of these quick, experimental head shapes, at the bottom right-most head of the page, it looks like I landed on something I liked – the big eyes and “ooh” mouth. I immediately did one fully realized Kirby-style sketch which would become Spluhh in my first story. At the bottom left. I wrote “Where Monsters #2,5 Taboo for globbiness.” At the time I began this project, the only references I had to Jack Kirby’s 1950’s-1960’s GIANT MONSTER comics were the 1970’s reprints by Marvel, in such comics as Where Monsters Dwell, Where Creatures Roam, and Creatures on the Loose. I flipped through my stack of these, and noted a globby monster named Taboo in issues two and five. My Spluhh monster is really very much just a swipe of Taboo.
