GREENFACE

GREENFACE

"[The legs were] each about six inches wide and perhaps six feet long, they seemed attached in a thick fringe all around the lower part of the head, like a Hawaiian dancer's grass skirt."

"The lines on its pulsing head formed two tightly shut eyes and a wide, thin-lipped, insanely smiling mouth."

"The smiling, jade-green face was turned toward Hogan, lit up by strange reflections from the stormy sky. The glistening, flowing mass beneath it writhed like a cloak of translucent pythons. It towered in the bay, dwarfing even the trees behind it in its unearthly menace. It had grown again! It was all of thirty feet high."

James H. Schmitz, Greenface

Read Scott's essay about Greenface here

Welcome to the first story from series 6 of Stories From the Borderland!

I had had the creatures drawn for series 5 of SFTB before our long hiatus. I was very excited to revisit them when Scott suggested we revive the series. He write brand new essays, I reposted the monsters from those stories and even drew a new one as a bonus. But series 6 really feels like the return for me. This is all new creatures to accompany all new essays. And boy are they weird creatures. The creatures in this series are some of the weirdest I've ever drawn!

First up is a truly bizarre monster from an unknown locale, Greenface! My approach to this creature was to treat it as an animal. In the story it acts like an animal and most of the malevolence & agency placed on it is based on the fact that it looks like it's got a human face. But the face is unmoving. 

I approached it as if it were an animal mimic. I specifically thought of the Hawk Moth Caterpillar that's evolved to look like a snake in order to deter predators. What if Greenface has evolved a human face in order to evade detection. 

The rest of it's description makes it sound like a jellyfish or an octopus. I drew inspiration from the Blue Bottle Jellyfish, which I remember seeing washed up on the beach when I was in Wollongong Australia. I imagined the ridges on the sail could easily translate to ridges on the "head" to form the "face".

Here are the illustrations of Greenface from it's first publication in the August 1943 edition of Unknown Worlds by William Augustin Kolliker. The yellow illustration is from the cover and is uncredited (possibly Ed Cartier).

Tune in next week for one of the weirdest creatures I've ever drawn!