(Will be posting future entries a little smaller so as not to disrupt the website's layout)

This one took a while to come together and I'm still not quite happy with it. For the fifth prompt in X!Gloop month, "Cosplaying", here's X!Gloop and Ahasveros Or Why Man Has Two Eyes cosplaying as Arzach and his unnamed lust interest.
Arzach by Moebius was a big influence on The Lives of X!Gloop but the story Pharagonesia was a bigger one because it had a lighter tone and more dialog. Both were the kind of stories that made me think "I want to do this". Of course, I couldn't draw like Moebius, but I could copy his anarchic, dream-logic-based approach to comics creation. Reading it now, it doesn't all hold up; I was struck by how sexist Arzach was, for example. But the art is still gorgeous to look at.

There doesn't seem to be one color scheme for Arzach's costume. I just picked one that looked OK to me, after a lot of false starts.

Prompt #4: Swimwear.
In the 2015 storyline, we see that story's reincarnation of X!Gloop, Xkolp, practice as a Sentience Councilor for the new species that continue to crawl out of the ooze, and sometimes ooze out of crawlspaces, on the muddy planet Ortentrum IV. He practices in the nude for several reasons: one, it's more comfortable for the new species, who typically emerge unclothed themselves; two, it's quite common across the universe for humans to go unclothed anyway; three and most importantly, the planet surface is covered in ooze and clothing only gets dirty. So Xkolp's swimwear is his skin, same as his everyday wear.

New species arising today include the Copic C4 Stufferfish, the Filtering Muck Gavial, and the Smooth Ooze Snood, all three of them well-adapted to life in the mud.

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…

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.

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.