X!Gloop Month Daily Drawing 3: Angry
by ReinderDijkhuis
This drawing, for which the prompt was "Angry", was inspired by
X!Gloop's trip to Hell where he only gets mildly pissed off originally. He should have been livid considering how his day had been…
X!Gloop Month Daily Drawing 2: In a uniform
by ReinderDijkhuis
In his final 100 lives, X!Gloop frequently found himself living as a semi-enslaved street vendor on Axolot, working long days and sleeping in communal barracks with a large group of other street vendors and living in mild fear of a crime lord called The Giraffe. The repetitive reincarnations helped him gain Awareness of his cycle of a thousand lives, but otherwise life as a street vendor had little to recommend it.
It was not clear why street vendors on Axolot had to wear a uniform, or why it consisted of a short striped shirt with long sleeves, loin cloth optional. Legend had it that thousands of years ago, all street vending was done by 3-feet-tall gastropodic creatures that could not wear pants, but that story had never been confirmed.
As seen in
Life # 990 from 1989.
X!Gloop Month Daily Drawing 1: In His Usual Outfit
by ReinderDijkhuis
On September 13, 1989, a day before my 18th birthday, I drew the first page of an improvised comic featuring this hapless guy. Three months later, the first story was done and our hero was sentenced by a court to die a thousand deaths. Which means that he has to live a thousand lives. I drew a few more short stories but eventually got stuck and abandoned the concept in 1993, only to make several aborted attempts to revive it every few years until 2015 when I took the first 11 pages of an unfinished story and redrew them. I am now, at a glacial pace, adding more new pages to that story.
But here's a reinterpretation of X!Gloop as he appeared that first time. When considering the outfit he wore at the time, I realized that he really was very much a child of the 1980s and it shows in his hair, choice of jackets and pants. I redrew him as a late-1980s heavy metal guy in stonewashed jeans.
The same year I started
The Lives of X!Gloop, I did student introduction week and one young man in my group was a heavy metal fan called Richard. He dressed like this, and had hair like this. He was a nice, softly spoken guy, but I never got to know him well because halfway through the week, he passed away unexpectedly from an undiagnosed heart condition. He was about 21, 22, maybe. Seeing this outfit made me think of him and if I had been drawing X!Gloop from the back, I would put a large Blind Guardian patch on his jean jacket in Richard's honor.