Eldritch Baby Winner and Backstory!

Hello everyone!

First off, the winner of the “Eldritch Baby” giveaway is…drumroll please..Katrina S! Congratulations! Keep an eye on your inbox for next steps.

In this newsletter installment, I thought I’d tell you all a little more about how this Eldritch character came to be in the first place. I started toying with the idea of creating Eldritch Gods as reoccurring characters back when I wrote “Cryptid Club”, where I had a Cthulhu character.

As you can see, this Cthulhu was sweet and shy, and I enjoyed portraying him in that manner. But one thing that I felt was lacking was a more cohesive cohort of Eldritch characters. The issue was that I could never seem to nail a joke for a forest-type Eldritch God, a common manifestation among Eldritch lore, and so Cthulhu remained the only one in the series.

Some years later, I wrote a very early rendition of a forest Eldritch creature for my most recent book, “Adulthood is a Gift”:

It’s super common for me to be toying with ideas for years before they fully manifest. I really wanted this character to come to life, but it took me a long time to find a funny angle to make it work. Finally, I landed upon a chatty approach where a more classic version of Cthulhu and the forest Eldritch God discuss human affairs with bafflement.

In this interaction, the Eldritch Gods think and act like old men, which is in theory kind of what they are (unfathomably ancient men?). This concept of being “old” was finally what I needed to find humor in the character and bring him to life, and it’s exactly that line of thinking that lead me to ponder what he must have looked like before he was, in fact, so truly ancient.

And thus: we have the Eldritch Baby.

And that’s the story! The first inklings of characters or ongoing jokes often appear long before they fully come to life, and that’s something that I just love about cartooning.

-Sarah