"The thing called Mop-Head was not an animal or plant or rock, although, by now it was a little of each. It had no definite body, and it longed for one. A scrap of elemental force that had drifted down over the field from far-off places, and settled long ago in the forgotten well, it had gradually build itself a body and consciousness over the years."
"From darkness and silence and damp, out of earth-mold and wet leaves and blown dandelions, of scum and spiders' legs and ants' mandibles and the brittle bones of moles it formed a shape and a sentience."
"The rising moon glistened on its fuzzy grayness, glittered in its many eyes. Its antenna waved in the warm air and the thing whimpered a little."
"Barndollar though he saw something run out of the dead mouth— 'like a big curly-haired mole, or a kind of shaggy spider,' as he described it later."
Leah Bodine Drake, Mop-Head
Read Scott's essay about Mop-Head here
Read Scott's essay about Mop-Head here
This is a rare one in two ways; first off it's a story I found and suggested to Scott, usually it's the other way round. Secondly, this is a story that featured art that I genuinely adore in its first publication!
Let's talk about the creature itself before we dive into that. Mop-Head is a marriage of both Scott's & my tastes; he loves a muck monster (Man-Thing, The Heap, Marjory the Trash Heap) and I love a creature with disparate elements that have to be joined together in some cohesive way (byakhee, aegipan, the unnamable). Mop-Head is both a slimy garbage heap but also an elemental made of spider, mole, rock & flower parts.
I tried to put a little bit of each thing she described in my drawing. If you look you'll see a spider, an ant mandible, mole bones, an antenna some wet leaves and a spent dandelion fluff.
The original art was done by Joseph Eberle. I can find shockingly little biography information about him but his work is pretty amazing. Especially this. In his essay Scott describes his art as "simultaneously cartoonish and disturbing" which is the aim of my entire artistic output.
Fun note, one of the only biographical tidbits I could find is that Eberle was born in Pittsburgh. So it should come as no surprise that he designed the iconic poster for George Romero's Dawn Of the Dead!
Eberle's Dawn Of the Dead cover & one of my favorite of his illustrations from Weird Tales.
This is the last entry in SFTB series 6 but we already have series 7 mapped out! We'll be back soon with even more creeps!
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