The Inking of the Review of the Revenge of the Creature

“Helen, I’ve missed you so much since our last date…two minutes ago.”

If your idea of romance involves two marine biologists engaged in an unending liplock while the fish-monster they unleashed upon the world mounts a bloody campaign of mayhem and murder up and down the Florida seacoast, then I’ve got the movie for you.

Creature pencils on Arches Hot Press watercolor paper, 10×14

Revenge of the Creature, the first sequel to Creature From The Black Lagoon, debuted 70 years ago. And because it’s one of my favorite Universal Monster movies, I’m celebrating its anniversary with a simple ink sketch of the gill man, and a re-watch of the film for nostalgia’s sake.

It’s 10:49. Do you know where your Creature is?

What you may notice about the second generation gill man are his eyes. More pointedly, how bulging and buggy those eyes are as compared to the original designs by makeup artist Millicent Patrick. She did such a fantastic job of bringing the creature to life originally, that she was fired from the studio, the credit for her groundbreaking work taken by makeup department chief Bud Westmore, ultimately causing her to retire from the film industry altogether. So for my ink sketch, I’m foregoing the bloated, swim-goggle eyes and sticking closer to Patrick’s original designs.

The nib worked well for tiny, fine-line texturing.

The plan was to ink a drawing of the creature, but I hadn’t worked out the how of it beforehand. So I picked out a Zebra G nib and inserted it into my Tachikawa nib holder, chose a couple small round Princeton synthetic brushes, and grabbed a few Micron fine liners just in case. As I worked, I found myself reaching for different tools for different reasons and ended up using a combination of all of them.

The brush and pen were nice for adding weight.

While inking the creature, I let the movie play on a loop in the background. If you think you haven’t seen it, trust me, you have. Or, at least, some version of it. Scientists bring a prehistoric creature into a theme park setting to entertain tourists, it gets loose, goes berserk, and kills a few people. Sound vaguely familiar? The special effects may seem quaint by today’s standards, but I guarantee you this fish monster leaping out of the aquarium tank during an afternoon dolphin show was just as frightening to audiences in 1955 as a T-Rex eating a guy off an outhouse toilet in 1993.

“Everybody out of the pool!”

Once the Creature was inked in, I had to figure out how I wanted to handle the Black Lagoon. In the movie, the monster spent a good deal of screen time in a Marineland aquarium tank. But he never belonged there. So the composition I planned was for him to be floating blissfully, if menacingly, back home in his lagoon in Brazil where he is the apex predator and not a sideshow attraction.

Line work finished, it’s time for the wash.

To achieve that, I had to run to the art store to grab a new brush. You can achieve a softly blended, underwater background pretty well using either a flat, wash brush or a mop. The flat will give you better precision, but the stroke edges may be too obvious if you’re not careful. The mop works better for diffuse blending, but I knew it would be hard to get in tight around the figure with those bristles. I didn’t have the financial latitude to spend fifty bucks buying both brushes, so I chose the mop and hoped for the best.

When working with this much water, a mop is always helpful.

Many of the underwater scenes in Revenge of the Creature can be a bit murky with floating clouds of particulate matter that suffuse those moments with a feeling of foreboding. The stirring of the sediment happens in two distinct ways. Early on, it’s the result of the absolutely savage underwater attacks the creature launches against the divers and scientists who are trying to capture and tame him. Later on, the silt from the bottom gets kicked up every time the creature spies longingly on the two scientists who, despite allowing a mysterious, one-of-a-kind beast to escape into the waters of Florida, nevertheless believe it’s responsible behavior to set up a dive-date so they can canoodle amongst the tropical fish.

“Helen….how could you?”

So my goal was to try to create a little mood through atmospheric perspective. Blocking in aquatic plant life in translucent layers, hoping to create the illusion of depth. I get hung up on details, sometimes, and it made this piece a little more time-consuming than originally planned.

These plants may or may not exist in nature, but they fit the scene.

But there’s also something relaxing about brushing in stalk after stalk of leafy pondweeds while the Creature from the Black Lagoon is on screen lurking outside the leading lady’s bedroom window.

“A girdle?! And she told me her figure was all natural!”

And that’s at the crux of all the gill man movies. It’s always a twisted love triangle that involves two scientists and a fish monster. Oh, sometimes there’s a fourth, blustery, male rival that throws his lure into the lake — some hunky diver or agro scientist — but he usually ends up as fish food. Revenge of the Creature is no different.

White ink works great for bubbles and any other highlights.

The monster may be the last of his kind, ripped from the safety of his private lagoon, and left to brood on the bottom of a commercial fish tank. The scientists studying him know his blood is similar to humans. So why it comes as such a shock to these animal biologists and behavioralists that the gill man might want to follow his instincts for species preservation and look for the nearest, most viable mate — even their human colleague —is baffling. Half of the scientists and divers at the aquarium were trying to date Helen the Ichthyologist. But they’re somehow caught unawares when the monster literally picks her up in a bar.

“It’s called the Lindy Hop and you can stop screaming!”

I won’t spoil the ending, but at this point, the movie wanders ever so slightly into King Kong territory. And if you’re aware of the measures authorities took to rescue Fay Wray from the giant ape (or Jessica Lange or Naomi Watts or Brie Larson), you have a general idea of how things go. But I like to imagine the monster survived his captors attempt to neutralize him. I used my illustration to help me visualize him back home, in his lagoon, away from meddling humans and their corporate overlords. I like to think he eventually meets a nice gill woman and has a couple gill children. Gilldren, technically.

I want to sink to the bottom with you.

And maybe, on some nights, when the lagoon grows dark and eerily quiet, he’ll share with his family a cautionary tale of strange, violent humans who break into your home, snatch you away, and chain you up in a strange prison thousands of miles away. And though stories like that may frighten them, it’s important to tell these tales. After all, there are monsters out there.

“I swear, if one more scientist dives down here I’ll sue.”

You can watch my inking process and endure our review of Revenge of the Creature in this week’s video at the link below.