cwisnia

This is how this first five page story was done. I pulled out all my seventies reprints of Kirby giant monster comics for reference, and just flipped through them. When things caught my eye, or sparked ideas, I made notes of them. I made lists of “monster splash pages”, and here’s a scan of it:

In case my hand-writing is difficult to decipher, here are some highlights (click the links to see how some of these wound up in later Doris Danger stories!):

Number 3 on the list. Mt. Rushmore
5. Underwater, scuba divers, fish
6. India – pagoda, Buddha statues
7. in space – monster wearing astronaut clear dome over head
8. Egypt – pyramid, sphinx
9. army attacking – full battle
10. one lone shirtless commando vs. monster
14. laboratory – giant monster with head hooked up – breaking free!
19. Africa

Again flipping through books, I made a list of different kinds of giant monsters Kirby had drawn: ape, ant, crab, abominable snowman, big foot, mummy, spider, cyclops, bee, robot, blob, Easter Island, reptilian, tiki, hairy, caveman, big forehead, striped, bird, 2-headed, and I would reference issue and page numbers so I could find them if I decided I wanted to do one of these kinds of monsters. I made lists of settings and elements – jungle, desert, lake, swamp, outer space, carnival, police officers, army men, hillbillies, again with issue and page numbers.

Now I had a bunch of options for making different splash pages of monsters.  When I made this first story, I don’t think I knew there would be more than one story, so this whole list thing I just said I do, I think I probably didn’t actually do it until these Doris Danger stories became “a thing.”  But even though I probably didn’t make the list yet, I DID flip through all the comics to decide what kind of monster I wanted to draw, and a jungle seemed like the perfect “exotic place,” and if it were on the shore of the ocean, even better!  And since Kirby’s monster splashes ALWAYS had people running around, cupping one hand to their mouth to shout their fears, and pointing frantically with the other – “tribesmen” or maybe army guys seemed necessary – so I did both.  (Notice there’s also an Australian Outback guy here!)

YOU can read more about this list and the creation of the finished page on page 018-019 double-page spread – Script

As for the monster itself, I found, I believe, THREE giant goopy slime monsters in the Kirby reprints I had in my possession at the time.  Here are some of them:

I loved the goopiness of all of these guys, so I took the goopy elements I loved most from each, such as whether it should have eyes and mouth, and created my Spluhh monster.