I posted a lot of these sketches on twitter as I drew them, but twitter isn't exactly the best gallery, so I figured I'd post most of them here as well. If you really wanted to, you could probably glean some future plot points from these, but at the same time, some of the ideas here were cut out, like the subplot about Boney having a soul parasite.
Before I started The Gully I had three other stories on the go - Realm of Basilisks, a story with a very nebulous plot that incorporated Christian imagery, a visual adaption of MCR's album The Black Parade, and Birds of Bad Omen, a folk horror parody that took place in Caledon. I basically ended up taking the characters from Basilisks, the art style I developed for my Black Parade fan art and the setting of Caledon and merging it into The Gully. I can still possibly see myself pursuing Birds of Bad Omen as an original entity in future. The characters above are Powers from Realm of Basilisks.
After watching Wendigoon's video summarizing Dante's Inferno I decided to use that as a starting point. Inferno has a lot more hell lore than the bible itself, so that would be fun to play with.
Boney was the first character I came up with. My first sketch is the one centre left labeled "Boney" and his design has changed very little. He's a very unoriginal mashup of various characters from movies I'd watched around the time, notably Monkeybone, Encino Man and In The Army Now. Boney is the only demon that looks like a cartoon, but that's eldritch in its own way.
I nailed down the appearance of Son of Lilith pretty quick too. I wanted to create a creature whose silhouette had a classic creepypasta vibe, so I pretty much just drew a reverse slenderman. Originally Lilith was a lot more fucked up, having a broken neck and missing his lower jaw, but the implication that he transformed from a human into a monster Jeff Goldblum style is probably gruesome enough, so I toned it down.
"ok but what if the leucrotta talks like Fenster" is basically Shears' entire character and he's become the comic relief even more than Boney is. I have written him an equally tragic backstory, but to Shears, dying and then coming back as a demon is more of a minor annoyance than anything. He's Boney's best friend despite his insufferable love of Sting, and before they meet Lilith and get sent on their Big Mission they spend most of their time together. Shears also actually owns a car, which is handy, but he's roughly the size and shape of a horse so he had to remove the front left seat to use it.
Kaiser is an older OC of mine. He's basically the Eraserhead baby all grown up. I was trying to find a spot for him in The Gully to give him another lease on life, but considering the first arc of this story is very much inspired by The Usual Suspects, a character named Kaiser who is actually the good guy would make things confusing.
The biggest design evolution from start to finish is definitely Kid Virgil. My design process here was basically "If you INSIST on attempting to pay homage to Juice Wrld in your weird zine at least make the character look halfway respectful" so I just went full Anubis because I have yet to meet someone who doesn't think Anubis is cool.
More sketches, including Shakalaka, Gillespie's protector and a parody of Ogopogo. Buckman, the deer guy, is very close to what the characters in my Black Parade art looked like. Loon W/ 7 Eyes is a holdover from Realm of Basilisks. Mari Lwyd might still make an appearance when seasonally appropriate.
Cyclops is essentially just Columbo as a fluffy wyvern and I love him. He doesn't get introduced until issue 2 which I'm sad about.
Gillespie is a selkie-like character and her design took me the longest to settle on. I eventually settled on it while flying from Athens to Montreal. I tried recording the exact coordinates of where I was at the time but I have no idea what I actually wrote there.
Not only do you never die: A character I ended up nixing.
Did you bring the passports?: Drawn during a layover at the Gatwick airport.
Kleibus. God, Kleibus. I draw too much of Kleibus
Aside from escaping from the rift in Caledon, Kleibus as a character does not yet have any solid connection to the setting or Matteo's family, which annoys me on a thematic and symbolic level. He doesn't actually have a big role until arc 2 which I'm still brainstorming.
But he's the only real villain besides the Caledon Anomalous Task Force itself, and unlike CATF, his motives are personal, so he's fun to draw. Kleibus is a balaur and can manifest up to 12 heads if he wants to, but unlike a hydra, cannot regrow one if it's chopped off.
So, that's nearly all the sketches up until this point. A lot of these characters won't show up until later but I'm glad I've finally managed to come up with a universe that's just complex enough for comfort. Not unwieldy in its complexity, but I can expand if needed. I deliberately wanted to make this story fairly basic so I could write it casually and follow wherever it naturally leads.
One thing I love about classic creepypastas is their lack of complexity. Yes, a lot of them fall back on low-hanging-fruit horror tropes like murder and Satan worship, but that simplicity makes them easy reads. I'm trying to be a bit more creative than that, but still not pressuring myself to try and write the next Divine Comedy.
If The Gully isn't good, at the very least, it's genuine.
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