"It was a great gray-black hood of horror moving over the floor of the sea. It slid through the soft ooze like a monstrous mantle of slime obscenely animated with questing life. It was by turns viscid and fluid. At times it flattened out and flowed through the carpet of mud like an inky pool; occasionally it paused, seeming to shrink in upon itself, and reared up out of the ooze until it resembled an irregular cone or a gigantic hood. Although it possessed no eyes, it had a marvelously developed sense of touch, and it possessed a sensitivity to minute vibrations which was almost akin to telepathy. It was plastic, essentially shapeless. It could shoot out long tentacles, until it bore a resemblance to a nightmare squid or a huge starfish; it could retract itself into a round flattened disk, or squeeze into an irregular hunched shape so that it looked like a black boulder sunk on the bottom of the sea.
Joseph Payne Breannan, Slime
In preparation for us reposting the first series of Stories From The Borderland, I took the opportunity to redo the color on my drawing of the slime. You can see the difference below. I decreased the contrast so more of the drawing shows through and I simplified the rendering so it makes more sense with the actual shape of the creature. I know it's called a slime but a lot of the references are of mud. That made me think a less of a shine on the creature would make it look more like a pile of wet earth.
I also didn't really dive into the history of the art for this story. It first appeared in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales with a cover & interior illustration by the illimitable Virgil Finlay. Finlay really captures the idea of this thing coming from the sea. He illustrates it to look like a wave, though I'm not really sure why he gave it arms...except that it looks cool.
While Slime was reprinted numerous times, the creature itself is only featured on the cover on The Shapes Of Midnight with art by Kirk Reinart. Other collections with cool covers include Nine Horrors And A Dream with cover by Richard Powers, Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum with art by Hector Garrido & The Feaster From Afar with art by Allen Koszowski.
As Scott states in his essay the film The Blob, wasn't officially an adaptation of Slime but Brennan successfully sued the studio. I enjoy the original 1958 version but the 1988 remake is one of my favorite movies of that decade. Unfortunately I can't find who the illustrator for the original poster was.
As far as my design goes, I really tried to stick to Brennan's description. When illustrating shapeless or shapeshifting things, my approach is to incorporate as many of the author's references as I can. I tried to make it look like a boulder, but also have the tentacles of a squid or starfish. Hunched and oozy at the same time. I really loved this story and the movies it inspired. And I love Stories From the Borderland and this story kicked the whole collaboration between Scott, Anya & I off.
I'll be doing more posts like this for the entire original first set of SFTB essays/illustrations as we post them.
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