I drew this graphic for my Redbubble store, because I thought it would be a funny visual pun. Albertosaurus's species name really is sarcophagus (which literally means "eater of flesh", so it's fitting for a theropod), so I couldn't resist the wordplay. (I know what is depicted here is a funerary mask and not an an actual sarcophagus, but Tutankhamun's funerary mask is what most people immediately think of when they think ancient Egypt.)

The lettering is based off demotic, the everyday script of ancient Egypt that arose in the mid-first-millennium BC. Which, yes, is anachronistic because Tutankhamun dates from about 800 years earlier, but demotic was an easier script to work off than hieratic, which is based on hieroglyphic. 

(Just wanted to cover all my bases for any Egyptologists out there. Apologies for going into pedantic detail about a silly doodle.)

T.K. Arispe and the Overused Middle-Grade Fantasy Clichés

I’m not really sure what got me on this subject. Maybe I’ve just randomly been thinking about the middle-grade books of my youth. Maybe it’s stemmed from seeing what my niece has been reading these days.

Regardless, lately I’ve been pondering the weird world of middle-grade fantasy fiction and thinking about what ultimately turned me off the whole thing when I was a kid, and what I’ve been trying to do differently in my writing which is why publishers don’t like me (which is fine).

This essay is one part rant, one part literary analysis, one part a deep-dive retrospective on Harry Potter. I dunno. Personal blogs are for odd stuff like this.

 

 I'm not really sure how many people are actually interested in my My Little Pony doodles... but I had fun with this one. I know I'm not the best pony artist out there and I'm in awe of people who are actually good at drawing ponies. But I've just been having a lot of fun with this fic I've been working on and I thought this concept sketch didn't turn out half bad. I know probably nobody is interested in this sort of thing, but I guess I just didn't want to leave this floating around on my tablet hard drive. 

If you couldn't care less about cartoon doodles and just want to see paleoart, I advise that you just click that handy "Paleoart" link on the top navbar and it will just show you everything tagged as paleoart. But hey, I'm interested in other stuff too. I love paleontology but it's not my entire life.

At any rate, here's mirrorverse Emperor Sombra without his armor. After absorbing the evil from Mirror-Celestia and Mirror-Luna so they would turn good, Mirror-Sombra became an even bigger and badder Big Bad than regular Sombra, turning his Crystal Empire into a desolate wasteland overrun by umbrum oppressing their pony underlings, and heightening his dark powers until he has started to look downright demonic. Now the emperor and his evil forces are locked in war with Mirror-Celestia and Mirror-Luna, and neither side can manage to gain the upper ground... but all Mirror-Sombra cares is that regular Celestia is safe.

Except, she decides to return to the mirrorverse and save Mirror-Sombra from himself because she misses him too much. Friendship is magic!!!!

With this design for evil!Mirror-Sombra, I tried to really distinguish him from regular Sombra to show how much more power he's accrued (which is also evidenced by his title of emperor rather than king). It was also crucial, story-wise, that he look significantly different from regular Sombra, because a reformed regular Sombra accompanies Celestia to the mirrorverse, and it would have introduced too many complications to the plot if he'd gotten mistaken for Emperor Sombra. (Which, yes, in itself would have been interesting, but I felt it would have unduly shifted the focus away from the main thrust of the plot which is Celestia trying to help Mirror-Sombra find a different solution to their multiverse dilemma.)

 That guy on Route 29 who's just always hanging out under that Berry tree.

Always.

 I apologize if this scares anyone... but it sure was fun to put together. I didn't realize Pokémon was a jumpscare game! (Honestly, sometimes random encounters can be kind of startling!)

 If you can't tell, that's supposed to be a Mega Ring and a Mega Stone.

I imagine all these crazy battle gimmicks that keep being introduced in later generations would make no sense to characters in the universe of the earlier games. Those were simpler times.

 Yeah, so by this point the whole "Professor Oak is an insane supernatural creature" thing is firmly embedded in comic lore. So much so that I was able to use it to add a new, unhinged layer to the originally simple narrative of a kid getting her first Pokémon to run an errand for a neighbor.

Because that's what comics riffing on video games are all about.