Kaiju Revamp - Gabara

This is something Ive been planning on doing for maybe 10 years or more but I never liked any of my designs. The idea was to do my own take on the monsters of the Godzillaverse and other film kaiju. Just about the time I thought I might start doing it I was beat to the punch by the amazing Matt Frank and his incredible Godzilla Neo series, and if you havent seen it you should! So not wanting to feel like some sort of copy cat I postponed my new series until now. With Godzilla Neo apparently long finished I feel the time is right to reveal my vision of various kaiju.

My goal is to create monsters with some basis in reality where my designs are concerned. So for my first effort I chose a Toho monster that Ive never really liked...Gabara. Created in a time when Godzilla was a children's hero and not a horrifying monster Gabara sufferd from a deliberately goofy design (google it..ugh!). How to take such an uncool monster and make him cool and still reflect his origin? Gabara looks like a cat/frog with a long neck and supposedly based on a Japanese Oni (ogre). It was the neck that decided me on using a polar bar for the basic body shape and keeping elements of cat, reptile and oni in my design. While my Gabara can stan ad fight he runs more like a bear or an ape now giving him far more agility that his clumsy inspiration. I now imagine him galloping along at high speed to make sudden leaping attacks so he can ho his electric claws into Godzilla! A much more worthy foe than before.

So I hope you all enjoy my transformation of a ridiculous rubber suit into a truly fearsome and lethal kaiju, the only kind of enemies the King of Monsters deserves to have.

Gabara is the property of Toho Co Ltd.

PS: As a point of interest this is the first serious drawing Ive done from start to finish solely in my computer. The penciling was roughed out in photoshop, I inked it in illustrator and then colored it in photoshop. Im pretty pleased with the results.