This was actually Prompt #6 in the drawing challenge, but I misread because I've been very sleep-deprived. That still hasn't improved despite me sleeping in tonight, and in all honesty, this one is here just to tick the box and say I haven't missed a day. That sometimes happens.

That being said, I realized that I haven't really done a lot of work on Skolp's house on the mud planet Ortentrum IV. One moment he's outside dragging the ooze creature to safety, the next he's in his living room with Ahaspar sitting on the couch. I think perhaps his house should have been a barrel-shaped tiny house like in a video my wife showed me the other day featuring a guy in Australia who builds them like that.

I looked at prompt #7: "With a New Hairstyle" and I thought I might as well. If I were to design X!Gloop from scratch now, he might wear something like this. I'm sure that at this exact moment in time, the look is already on its way out - the last time I saw it referenced was in a dreadful Will Self piece about people in their forties. But it would still work as a look for X!Gloop, who never was quite at the cutting edge of fashion.

In the previous blog entry, I mentioned I was suffering from sleep deprivation. This has been causing me to make many smaller and larger mistakes during the working week, and it's also caused me to pick the wrong prompts from the list. This was actually prompt #8, the previous one was prompt #7, and I skipped the actual #6, which was "Sleepy", ironically. I will draw that one next and I'm sure I'll be able to put quite a bit of feeling into it.

Prompt #6: In Formal Dress. An opportunity to re-imagine X!Gloop's outfit from the one-pager Esklop and the Buggerized Hyphens from 1989 or 1990. The pose wasn't that inspired and I didn't feel like adding a background; I have been suffering from fatigue this week due to interrupted sleep. However, I practiced my texturing in Sketchbook a little.

(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.