Been a while since the last one of these, huh? Karamtor was a bit overdue - unlike the other unfinished models, I’ve actually finished Karamtor’s debut chapter, as all the other unfinished ones don’t appear until the last eight chapters in Volume 2. So getting her finished was kind of a milestone - I’ve “caught up” to the draft now, which gives me a good chance of completing the rest in time for whenever I finish Volume 2.
I’m kind of amazed how well her model works - her skeleton is very top-heavy, so I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to stand up on two legs like I wanted her too. I also managed to get her tongue to fit in her head when her mouth is closed, which is something I wasn’t sure was gonna work. All in all, a good return to form.
Nastadyne’s puppet was complicate for the same reason Bobo’s was - the material I use for exoskeletonpieces isn’t as flexible as, y’know, fabric, and so I had to make fabric skins over the joints and then curl the exoskeleton foam rubber over it and hope it sticks in the right shape. Still, the end result is worth it - Nastadyne looks pretty swell!
Date Discovered: September 27th, 1954 Place of Origin: Venus Notable Stomping Grounds: Mt. Fuji, Typhon Island Height: 160 feet Length: 220 feet Biology: Hailing from the planet Venus, Karamtor is…
I got a lot of kaiju files posted yesterday! Starting with Karamtor(above), we also have:
Date Discovered: March 19th, 1954 Place of Origin: Mount Ibuki Notable Stomping Grounds: Mount Ibuki, Tokyo, Typhon Island Height: 35 feet Length: 140 feet Biology: Burodon is definitely a retrosau…
Ok, NOW we’ve done the last retrosaur. Well, maybe not if we count Pathogen, but he’s really a whole lot of things in one. Burodon takes even more liberties than his kind - fitting for a retrosaur that’s an homage to the creations of Eiji Tsuburaya. He’s not alone today, as we also two other monsters in this batch:
Kurokame, seen above, is basically a crocodile and tortoise fused together with a little bit of Bowser thrown in for good measure. His name is a combination of the Japanese words for crocodile and tortoise/turtle, though a friend of mine pointed out it could also mean “black turtle,” and thus be considered a reference to the mythological monster Genbu. That’s a lot of stuff going on for a big freaky turtle, but appropriate considering the chapter he’s in is even more Godzilla/Gamera inspired than the others are.
Finally (for this batch), we have Nastadyne, a great big beetle monster. Nastadyne’s design, like Crustakra’s, is repurposed from a Godzilla monster redesign I did years ago - specifically one for Megalon. While A.T.O.M. focuses on Tyrantis’s journey, it’s my intention that there are actually a lot of OTHER kaiju running around independent of him and the ones he encounters. Nastadyne is the hero of one of those other stories - or, perhaps more simply, he’s to Japan what Tyrantis is to the USA. In older drafts Godzilla filled that role (this used to be fanfiction), so... I guess that makes Nastadyne Godzilla’s stand in, in a way? Huh.
Nastadyne’s “Burning Justice” form was inspired by some fanart a friend of mine made that interpreted the beetle’s original, gaudier color scheme as a sort of power up. It was a cool idea, and also one that’s fitting for the star of the Japanese chapter of Tyrantis’s story - it only makes sense to have a DBZ/Burning Godzilla style power up in that chapter, and it allows Nastadyne to work even better as Tyrantis’s Japanese counterpart without just giving him a death ray or something. The name “Burning Justice” comes from the Transformers fandom.
The sixth entry in my take on the 30 Day Kaiju Challenge. I've got a lot of arthropod monsters in my kaiju pantheon as well, and it was real tempting to just use this as an opportunity to slightly revamp one of them instead of creating something whole cloth. I decided to challenge myself instead.
I started off trying to make a giant grasshopper monster as an homage to one of my favorite MST3K movies/episodes, The Beginning of the End. It didn't work for me, though, and eventually my mind turned towards beetles. I used some of my old high school redesigns for Megalon as inspiration and basically turned them into their own beastie.
So this is Nastadyne, a bug that puts the "beat" in beetle. Haha, that doesn't work when you don't say it out loud. If he could talk he'd sound like Tom Hardy's weirdly jovial take on Bane. I imagine him to be a very showy fighter - like a luchador in the body of an insect monster.
