A Trip Into The Wilderness: Maeve Whalen For AnOther Magazine Fall / Winter 2017

a trip into the wilderness: maeve whalen for anOther magazine fall / winter 2017

Companions of Christmas 4: The Krampus!

The Krampus was a rural giftgiver who would deliver presents to good alpine children, but the naughty ones? Well, he’d stuff them into his basket and take them back to his lair, where they would be forced to spend the next year making toys for good kids. They’d be released the following Christmas, but even so, a year of forced labor in captivity is not ideal for anyone, much less a child.

Kids from this area, terrified of the Krampus, started writing St. Nicolas (already widely known for defending children from harm) letters asking for his intercession, and the saint obliged. He and the Krampus had a rumble, and St. Nick successfully shackled the Krampus with the chains that had once held St. Paul of Tarsus.

Bound by the magic of this holy relic, the Krampus had to accompany St. Nick for the next few years, and in observing his captor came to see that his punitive approach to kids wasn’t the best way to ensure their good behavior or long-term character betterment after all. Thus reformed of his kid-beating, kid-stealing ways, the Krampus was released by St. Nick, though he asked to retain the chains so that they would always remind him of how NOT to help put right kids that are straying from the path of goodness, kindness, and charity, but to instead practice those tenets himself in order to best right wrong behavior.

He still has his avuncular sense of humor, and likes to put milder scares into wee ones, so expect to get a light whap with his bundle of switches, and a short ride around the room in his basket.

The titanic Choglaem

My response to this week's Bestiaryposting challenge from The Maniculum!

Unlike the other challenges, I didn't have a clear idea how this was going to look until I sat down to this - I was in a little bit of a rush,

It's a pen and ink drawing (dark sepia ink, and a sailor fude nib) over a very loose pencil sketch mostly to get the proportions right. I wanted to do more ink drawing because I figure it'll encourage me to learn, and there are a few spots where I managed to smudge the ink with my fingers, and the ventral scales look a little wonky (clearly I need to use more references!). If I'd had more time I might have drawn more scale detail, as snake scales are really cool, but I had fun and (hopefully) learned a bit! :D

Reasoning below the cut...

"The Choglaem is bigger than all other snakes or all other living things on earth." - large snek! This immediately made me think of Titanoboa (while cool, I'm not convinced bestiary writers would have been familiar with Palaeocene megafauna) and the fabled Sucuriju of the Amazon rainforest (a massively over-exagerated anaconda). I can't think of many creatures in nature or myth (apart from lions and rocs, respectively) that eat elephants, so this was going to be interesting...

"The Choglaem, it is said, is often drawn forth from caves into the open air, causing the air to become turbulent." - I wasn't sure how to represent this, and the other behaviour at the same time. Maybe I should have included some dramatic clouds or other atmospheric phenomena; I'm going to be interested to see how everyone else tackled this element!

"The Choglaem has a crest, a small mouth, and narrow blow-holes through which it breathes and puts forth its tongue." - For the crest, I felt I had two options; either something resembling the Naga of south east Asia, or spines like an oarfish - I went with the latter. I didn't want to give it a hood, since it notes below that this creature is non-venomous, and for the same reason I decided not to give it a cockerel's crest and wattle (associated with both the anecdotal crested cobra, and of course the cockatrice...)

We also have the tips of the snake's tongue poking out of its nostrils. As for the mouth, if it's going to be eating elephants (!) I'm not convinced the mouth can be that small, so I figured that from the front, with the jaws closed, it looks like it has a small, dainty mouth (at least until it opens it...!

"Its strength lies not in its teeth but in its tail, and it kills with a blow rather than a bite. It is free from poison. They say that it does not need poison to kill things, because it kills anything around which it wraps its tail." - Now if I was being smarter, I would have looked at the difference in anatomy between colubrid and non-colubrid snakes (including boas and pythons) - I'm way more familiar with colubrid snakes, having kept a garter snake years ago!

Reading this paragraph back, I missed that it seems to whack creatures with its tail; that would have been fun (KA-POW!), but it made sense to lean more towards the constrictor-side of things in terms of illustrating the hunting behaviour.

"From the Choglaem not even the elephant, with its huge size, is safe. For lurking on paths along which elephants are accustomed to pass, the Choglaem knots its tail around their legs and kills them by suffocation." - I figured we'd have some stylised trees on either side to represent the elephant trail, and a somewhat startled looking elephant starting to get knotted up...!

I also thought I'd try putting a simple border on the picture to frame it this time round (an idea that I've definitely stolen from a number of the other awesome participants in these challenges!).

I'm looking forward to seeing what this creature ends up being :)

by @spavel.bsky.social

Don't forget also the role of Principal Boy, the young male protagonist of the pantomime traditionally played by an actress in boys clothes. There's a good overview of this on the website of the Victoria and Albert museum, but in short, this was absolutely considered risqué around the time it began to be commonplace (mid-1800s), and many of the actors performing these roles came from music hall backgrounds (often considered a more 'lower class' or vulgar sort of entertainment) where they were male impersonators (what we might consider drag kings today).

Victoria and Albert Museum

The story of pantomime · V&A

The familiar trappings of the classic British panto owe much to the innovations of Victorian entrepreneurs, performers and designers

It's more outside of my area of experience, but opera has also traditionally had such 'breeches roles', at least in part to utilise different vocal ranges.

Why is pantomime so gay?

Let me tell you something: I became curious and watched some televised ones on Youtube, and why is this British Christmas entertainment so gay?

I'm not complaining, just very surprised.

The great pantomime dame is a drag queen in everything but name. And I thought they would be only villains, but even more heroic characters like Jack's mother from Jack and the Beanstalk and Aladdin's mother can be played like that.

Widow Twankey, Aladdin's mother in the panto, even uses humor that is not very far off from a real drag queen.

How did the snakes we know now get so small compared to the titan boa

that question is actually a little backwards- only once in their entire 65+ million year history have snakes EVER achieved the massive size of the titanoboa, and a couple of unlikely factors had to align absolutely perfectly for it to happen!

first, there had to be an open niche for a gigantic superpredator without any competition at all to allow the tiny existing snakes time to evolve into the role- and this happens less often than you think! an opening this size requires major ecosystem disruption to produce, but luckily (?) for titanoboa, its stars aligned somewhat literally when a meteor descended from the heavens to wipe out the competition and murder not only the nonavian dinosaurs, but most of the other contenders that could have quickly evolved to fill the newly-vacant superpredator niche had they not all died in a horrific fiery world-ending catastrophe! 

“oh shit! my ecological niche!” <art src: Donald E Davis>

(snakes, by the way, survived due to their ability to burrow and hibernate through the worst of it. when in doubt, snooze it out!)

and second, it turns out that in order to produce a 50-foot snake, you need a LOT of heat and humidity- and the titanoboa evolved during a period in earth’s history when the environment was much warmer and wetter than it is now. just an absolute sauna. (with giant snakes in it, watch out)

these two factors combined to produce a once-in-a-hundred-million-years event and allowed the titanoboa to evolve and reign absolutely supreme over its humid rainforest environment... until the climate crashed again just a couple million years later and brought an abrupt and chilly end to the age of the giant snakes.

au revoir, you beautiful bastard.

<art src: DarrenPepper>