Sketch book:

My buddy Zach wants to do a comic collaboratively about the end of the world.  So, here's Fenrir, alos one of the Dragons of the Bible.

Also:

Jörmungund, the Midgar serpent.

Contribution from the late Martin V. Shiloh.

One of these days, I'm going to post up some short biographies of the ESS members, founders and helpers.  Although, I did give a pretty extensive background on the whole organization.

One of the founding New York members (from around 1927) was a fellow called Martin V. Shiloh.

He was a specialist in archeology and loved to gallivant around Europe.  He had that typical Lovecraftian fascination with Hyperboria and Mu, the lost civilizations of the "Golden Age of Men."  Most his searching was in the Mediterranean with a Polish gentleman named Christoph Zebrowskiwho was a treasure hunter of sorts.  An Indiana Jones sort of fellow.  Professor Shiloh went missing in the fall of 1939 while researching in southern China.

Well, Professor Shiloh donated something like 85% of the ESS library and was a enormous archeology nerd.  His cataloged work and findings are so extensive (and unorganized) that I've only begun going through them (because I'm the young, stupid, clerical member of the society and Dr. Jones has way more going on).  But I found something cool and thought it deserved some attention.

From the papers with the photo:

"5/6/29.  Found in a burned longboat.  Remarkable craftsmanship.  Appears ceramic, very solid.  Depicts Thor struggling in coils of world serpent."

Professor Shiloh was a man of few words.

Garm: The Surgeon

So, I like stories.  I like working within the weird and mystical.  So I've made a cult or two on paper (hopefully nothing carried over to real people).  My favorite is the anarchistic Children of Xyn.  They worship entropy and decay, reveling in the gradual destruction of all things.

They have a hierarchy, sort of.  There's the leader, calling himself Ragnarok and using those that follow him as puppets.  And then there are the surgeons, the few who aren't held in thrall by Ragnarok.

Garm is their leader.  He's distinguished himself from the others by proving very (very) hard to kill.  I've sculpted him twice.  Once in a (just under) life-sized ceramic bust.  Once in full-body on an action figure scale.

That one is about nine inches tall.  He hangs out on my desk.

The whole idea behind these guys came from something I drew in high school, and it evolved from there.  These gas-mask wearing monstrosities with broken bio-mechanical parts.  This spawned into an elaborate character driven idea and a fascination with possession resulting in the cult as I currently imagine it.  I sort of imagine Garm as the Grima Wormtongue of the cult, the treacherous right hand man of the king.

Garm is also the name of the hound that guards Hel (the goddess and the underworld in Norse myth) and in some descriptions I've found, its front is always wet and red with blood.  Fitting for a surgeon whose duty is outfitting the willing and unwilling with weapons that don't fit their biology, no?