#tyrantor

Some of my old friends from the DA kaiju fandom days collaborated to make this picture celebrating the release of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and of course I pitched in as well.  A lot of them aren’t on tumblr (or if they are I’m unaware of it), so check out its DA page for the full list of credits.  I’ll tag the ones I know are on here:

@riftwitch

@scatha5

@nazrigar

@carnivorecreations

@rendragonclaw

It’s time for more A.T.O.M. Volume 1 trivia!  Today we’re gonna talk about the monsters!

- Tyrantis is my oldest OC, having been made when I was six.  The original pitch for him was that he was what would happen if a Tyrannosaurus rex had been mutated by an atom bomb instead of a godzillasaurus, which is why his name is a portmanteau of Tyrannosaurus and “Gigantis,” one of Godzilla’s less well known alternate names.  It’s also why he breathes fire.  However, because Tyrantis was also meant to be Godzilla’s sidekick at the time, his powerset was specifically less impressive than Godzilla’s - i.e. normal fire instead of nuclear fire.  While he’s become more and more his own character as time went on, I decided to make that limitation a law of his character - Tyrantis is not meant to outshine the monster icons that came before him, but rather stand alongside them.

- Tyrantis was originally represented in my childhood playtime by a Jurassic Park juvenile T.rex, which is why I’ve adamantly kept his head looking very Jurassic Park-y in all his incarnations (huge goofy overbite, big eyebrows, bumpy nasal ridge, etc.).

- One of my earliest attempts to tell Tyrantis’s story as a kid involved the Lego Movie Maker stop motion program.  While I never figured out how to get the buggy program to work, my failed attempt to make a Tyrantis movie at the time did have one lasting effect: the Lego T.rex toy that would play him happened to have these big spikes on its arms (because they were originally made for the Lego Dragon figure), which all subsequent incarnations of Tyrantis would incorporate as one of his important design details.

- The armored scutes on Tyrantis’s curved neck and his crocodilian tail are direct homages to Ray Harryhausen’s Gwangi (and countless other stop motion theropods), while his pronounced “cheek” bumps are taken from multiple monster suits by Eiji Tsuburaya.  Add in the obvious Stan Winston Jurassic Park t.rex head and you have a design that pays homage to three of my favorite monster creators.

- One of my goals in writing Tyrantis was to keep his status as a both an archetypal monster AND child’s wish fulfillment character intact.  He’s a big, green, fire-breathing reptile, the kind countless children have imagined, and while he’s rowdy and loves fighting other monsters (because that’s what monsters do), he’s also kind and protective of the weak.  Part of the fun of writing this final version of A.T.O.M. was juxtaposing this innocent, child-like character against a more serious and complicated world.

- Gorgolisk, the gigantic prehistoric snake monster in the story, is almost as old as Tyrantis.  Her original incarnation was called Hydra and, true to her name, had seven heads instead of just the one.  While her design and name has changed a lot since then, her status as the cool and collected counterpart to impulsive and foolhardy Tyrantis has remained a constant.

- Ironically, while Gorgolisk is no longer explicitly connected to Dr. Lerna as she was in earlier drafts, the two remain very similar in personality.

- Ahuul, Tyrantis’s pterosaur-inspired antagonist, is also fairly old, though like Gorgolisk he went through a name change.  Ahuul’s first incarnation was named Kongamatu, and was a kaiju-fied version of the African pterosaur cryptid of the same name.  Other names he tried out included Wendigo, Ahool, and Ahul, the later two belonging to another cryptid that is sometimes believed to be a pterosaur, and his final name is obviously a play on that same monster (though the novel gives it a different origin).

- Earlier versions of Ahuul weren’t quite as nasty, but still began as antagonistic creatures.

- Bobo, the giant friendly spider, began as a character I made up in a jokey and heavily embellished autobiographical comic I made in middle school.  The original Bobo was a significantly smaller giant spider (about the size of a car) that lived under a trapdoor in the walkway to my house.  It was a REALLY dumb comic, but I liked the idea of Bobo as this protective spider-monster, and eventually she found a home as a kaiju in Tyrantis’s story.

- The name “Bobo” is inspired by the song “Boris the Spider” by The Who.  I made it cutesier because, to my teenage brain, that made it all the more hilarious.

- Tyranta and Tyrantor owe their existence to both The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Gorgo, as a young me thought that the key to making a monster sympathetic was to give it a family.  While I now think that isn’t strictly necessary, being a loving father and devoted spouse has been a core part of Tyrantis’s character for a long time, and his family is one of the traits that makes him stand out from most other monsters.

- The fact that Tyranta is slightly larger and stronger than her male counterparts was inspired by a popular idea among dinosaur fans that the female tyrannosaurids were larger than the males.  There isn’t a great deal of scientific evidence supporting this claim, but it’s persistent nonetheless, and I think it makes for an interesting dynamic.  Plus monogamous species tend to have larger females than males, and Tyrantis and Tyranta are definitely monogamous, so in a way I’ve stumbled into scientific accuracy after all!

- The first incarnation of MechaTyrantis hails from the short but influential Lego era of the story, and was made to be roughly the same size as the green Lego T.rex toy.  His flesh and blood head, tail, and feet are all design elements that can be traced to that custom Lego model, as are the rough shape of his distinctive Gravity Manipulation Canons (which originally came from one of the early Lego Star Wars sets).

- No one will believe me, but MechaTyrantis’s nature as a cyborg instead of a full-on robot predates the existence of Kiryu by quite a few years.  Rather than fight it, I decided to lean into the accidental similarities in the published novel.

ATOM Stop Motion Models: Tyrantor Take 3

ATOM Stop Motion Puppets: Kraydi and Tyrantor 2.0

Kraydi’s model, like Crocogon’s, was fairly simple to make.  It was kind of nostalgic seeming him in the “flesh” again, though - Kraydi began life as a dragon/lizard monster sculpture, so it feels sort of full circle.