"ERMIN MEONSTOKE" Sacrifice Upon The Waves - Part Two Post Three

Ermin Meonstoke's scene in this posting is a pretty standard 'zombie-killing fare' for my drawings and sticks rigidly to my three-frame formula of (i) zombies eat someone, (ii) Ermin blasts one and then (iii) Ermin runs away. The only addition to this particular encounter is that I used Mister Gotch as an opportunity to impart some more 'real world' facts about the Eclipse. For some reason the headgear of the helmet-wearing Third Reich zombie also would appear to be slipping back off of its head. 

Miss Priscilla's brief frame was simply included to slowly push along her plot, and use the revelation that Weimar's sacrifice will bring back her long-dead German grandfather as a cliff-hanger for the next instalment. 
   

Desperate to reach the main deck area and safety, Ermin Meonstoke discovers that the cruise liner has suffered more than just the ones hull breach. But will the 'Saviour of Souls' be able to react quickly enough to help his companion Mister Gotch evade the hungry undead..?

"ERMIN MEONSTOKE" Sacrifice Upon The Waves - Part Two Post Two

One of the reasons this particular story is a five-parter as opposed to my usual four episodes in length, is because I needed some additional space to set up the adventure and establish the motivations of the main 'guest' characters. Ordinarily I can usually accomplish this within the first twelve or so frames. But for this story it was clear I was going to take a little longer; thus it is only now, as the reader starts to close in upon the conclusion of the second instalment, that Miss Priscilla confirms this entire situation has in some way been manipulated by Weimar's grandmother since shortly after the young woman's birth.

I had always wanted to write a tale based upon large vessel sinking beneath the waves and trapping the passengers in a 'Titanic-like' fashion. The addition of the clawing Undead swimming down the ship's corridors and dragging its passengers to a gory death made the prospect doubling exciting. However as I couldn't have either Mister Gotch or Meonstoke eaten (at least not this early into the adventure) I added the nameless seafarer into the scene in preparation of an imminent horrible demise.
   

Determined to seal the hull breach, the crew of the cruise-liner Eclipse discover that it is not only salt water which is seeping into the vessel. For the long-dormant dead of the Third Reich have awoken and have need of fresh flesh...

"ERMIN MEONSTOKE" Sacrifice Upon The Waves - Part Two Post One

The first of these two scenes hopefully sets up that something horrible is about to happen to the cruise liner Eclipse, and rids Ermin Meonstoke of his 'facade' that he is just an ordinary member of the crew. With hindsight I should probably have dressed him in one of the sailor's outfits as opposed to his standard tie and collar costume. In addition there are an awful lot of ellipses in this sequence. 

Weimar's blindness, which by its very nature necessitated someone having to explain to her what was happening, gave me a lot of opportunities to provide Miss Priscilla with some wonderfully 'cliche' horror-themed dialogue.  

As Miss Priscilla battles the Undead and desperately tries to keep young Weimar safe, Ermin Meonstoke must investigate the cause of the unnerving banging upon the exterior hull of the cruise liner. What could possibly be clambering up the great ship's side... and will steel plates be enough to prevent their entry... 

"ERMIN MEONSTOKE" Sacrifice Upon The Waves - Part One Post Three

This entire first episode was written to simply establish the good from the bad characters and incorporate the Undead as quickly as possible, and as such I think it works quite well; albeit being a bit obvious that the grandmother was up to no good.

I've written drawn many zombie stories and their appearance has hardly changed at all since I started. For this adventure I simply mixed my standard cadaver heads onto the bodies of some German soldiers I'd created earlier and dirtied their uniforms up.  

Miss Priscilla must fight for her life in a house quickly filling with the hungry Undead. But beneath the waves a second army of walking corpses is stirring, and Ermin Meonstoke must use all his powers of persuasion to save the passengers on board the cruise liner Eclipse.   

"ERMIN MEONSTOKE" Sacrifice Upon The Waves - Part One Post Two

Based upon a genuine cruise ship which travels to the Galapagos Islands, I wanted to use this opening scene of Ermin Meonstoke and Mister Gotch to impart a little bit of information about how many passengers were on board the Eclipse, as well as how fast it travelled.

In a slight departure from my usual storyline formula for zombie tales, I also wanted to show that the 'saviour of souls' had already embarked upon this adventure prior to the reader 'picking it up'. For the ghoul killer has somehow managed to gain passage on the vessel as part of the ship's crew.

With Meonstoke at all at sea, Miss Priscilla finally comes face to face with Lady Weimar Von Keitel's birthday guests... and discovers they've been waiting longer than a lifetime for the celebration. 

"ERMIN MEONSTOKE" Sacrifice Upon The Waves - Part One Post One

Drawn in August 2009, this is actually a 're-boot' of a series of "Mooretoons" I drew approximately nine years earlier and continues the ghoul-killing adventures of Ermin Meonstoke and his faithful secretary, Miss Priscilla. A five-parter, "Sacrifice Upon The Waves" involves two elements I thoroughly enjoy incorporating into my stories, rising water levels and flesh-eating Nazi Zombies; so plenty of both are contained within its pages.

With these opening few panels I really just wanted to set the scene of an isolated and  sinister elderly German woman, preparing her blind grand-daughter for the girl's eighteenth birthday... Unfortunately I never changed the font of the pensioner's dialogue, so for now the only connection to this odd couple and the days of the Second World War is their family name Von Keitel.

Miss Priscilla's appearance in the final frame is actually a play upon how I usually start my "Ermin Meonstoke" tales, as ordinarily it is the titular character who first appears infamously declaring "I have come to save your souls." However for this story I wanted to separate the partnership right from the beginning, and needed to establish the secretary's plot first and foremost.

What manner of foul menace is soon to rise from it's grave to threaten the birthday celebrations of 'Lady Weimar Von Keitel'? And what has it to do with a new employee starting work on board the cruise liner Eclipse?

"THE RAMBLER" The Time Henge" - Part Four Post Three

As this was the first of four stories drawn for a new series of "The Rambler" I purposely didn't fully resolve the creation of a new Timeman until the end of the following four-parter "The Yeti Hunters". But the first two panels do at least provide some clarification that the 'dying' Rambler has ended his journey, and it is now time for his replacement to start his.  

The last scene set on Beorge is a serious cop-out as I used the opportunity to have the fish-like aliens 'save' the outgoing Rambler by healing his wounds and returning him to the location where he was first imbued with the ability to time-travel. Previously I had established that a new Earth Timeman is only selected upon the death of the current one. But I had enjoyed writing and drawing this character for so long that I simply did not have the heart to kill him off. So gave him a somewhat 'sickly sweet' ending.

"The Rambler" will return. But first, the Undead have started to rise from a watery grave and threaten the passengers on board a luxury cruise liner. Fortunately masquerading as one of the crew is the Ghoul Collector, the Saviour of Souls himself... "Ermin Meonstoke".

"THE RAMBLER" The Time Henge" - Part Four Post Two

I tried with the first two frames of this posting to better explain what the enemy time agent's device was actually doing, as I felt I probably hadn't covered it too well in the story's first three episodes. I'd actually left the exact nature of the threat somewhat 'open' to interpretation because I had wanted to use it to generate a sense of mystery around the Rambler and what exactly he was up to. But in hindsight this might have been a mistake. In essence however the time destructor has literally been burning away the Earth's timeline from its end back towards its beginning, and the Timeman needed to put an end to it before it reached the planet's beginning and had literally wiped out all of history. 

As the story is also the first of a new series, and thus a bit of a re-boot, I wanted to reiterate and better explain that the Rambler receives his time-travelling abilities from the Beorge. But that even they have their limits if their time agent is too badly injured, as he is in this case.

The Rambler is gravelly injured, and time is finally running out for Earth's Timeman. But all is not lost as the alien Beorge identify a new individual to become the planet's time-travelling champion...