Arnold two ax was busy at the back of the great hall having an axe throwing contest.
Have you ever tried axe throwing? It's entertaining, but to be honest if you run some numbers, the actual forces involved are pretty poor.
As are Arnolds chances against Grendel.
Bye Arnold.
Kurt Big Knuckles, has been showing off his arm arm wrestling skills at the back of the great hall.
He doesn't need any weapons, Grendel is a big bloke, and he's smashed better blokes for breakfast... buuut he hasn't, he's just seen the normal array of toughs.
You shall not pass!
Scimitar Sven brandishes his sword, which isn't a scimitar but a sword, but he doesn't know that, and he spends a lot of time telling people how much better his scimitar is than their longsword.
It's not, it doesn't even graze Grendel's skin, and when I say Skin I mean scaly armour.
So they form a shield line, probably, and first in the line is Frank. I think he's a Frank, strangely all of these folks have beards, but Frank looks like he's just got a 'tache.
11 days in.
Olaf Olafson, the generic Dane leaps to his feet with his sword swinging. Although I think historically he'd more likely have a spear? Who knows.
Little good it'll do him, he'll just get grabbed and scoffed like the rest of them.
Poor Olaf.
Mrs Hrothgar,
Doris,
Not very pleased by the giant grendel messing up her soiree, whipped out her short sword, and was rewarded by a nice bit of lens flare.
I only added the lens flare for old times sake, I used to use it all the time. Today I had to trim the image in photopea... which is like photoshop in the browser but free, and without the half hour loading time....check it out.
I did a quick check and what do you know photopea has lens flare.
The least convincing of the Lewis Chessmen pieces seems to be the knight. I guess they struggled to suggest the grandeur of the mounted warrior in the same size lump of walrus tooth as they used for the other pieces.
Still, it's fine, and to be fair if you were going to have to fight Giant Grendel in the Great Hall you'd probably want as much advantage as you can get... which lets face it, isn't that much on this tiny horse.
Finally someone worthy of the term warrior, and remember it was 30 warriors that Grendel snatched up, the rest were like appetisers or snacks or something.
So here's a shield biter, or beserker.
Which is probably sort of scary if you are in a normal warrior type fight, but you know what Grendel doesn't give a fig.
So the Bishop,
Bishop Brennan was just about to leave, he'd had a full side of beef, and wasn't really up for the sort of three string tunes the bard is playing.
Sadly he is just collateral damage from Grendel.
I've found a way to get the inked drawing into Autodesk Sketchbook as a transparent layer. If you select the scan image function it does some automatic image detection thing and grabs a frame, you don't have any control over the shape, but with a bit of trial and error you can get something useful, then drop some colour on it.
Anyway
This is Bald Bjorn, Bard. Sitting by the door of the Great Hall and singing songs of great battles, weaving in the names of folks as they enter, in the hope of garnering a free drink.
He was a fighter a long time ago, but these days he sings and plays his lute.
Day 5 and just behind the dusty guy is Boars Head Bjorn, who's just had a tasty chicken leg and a a slug of mead, or something mead like. He's really not set up for a fight with anything more lively than a rasher of bacon. I give him a couple of seconds against Grendel.
Dusty Sven was inside the door of Hrothgar's hall just hanging around, with a pig pen dust cloud, which could actually be fleas jumping off that filthy wolfskin jerkin. His axe is pretty substantial and could cause a bunch of damage, but unfortunately Grendel's hide is pretty impervious to swords and that sort of stuff.
Now I look at it I think I put the axe head on askew... so it'd be pretty useless against Grendel anyway.
Guardian at the gate.
Just one fella outside Hrothgar's hall, he must have done something bad to get his duty. Let's assume he's not in the top tier of Hrothgar's minions.
Sweaty Erik is his name, and he's ripe, which must be pretty bad going by the general Dane levels of hygiene, probably something to do with wearing that heavy mail shirt.
In most of the versions of Beowulf there's a bunch of stuff about how big and grand Hrothgar's hall is. I'd always assumed it was puff, or filler, but now I've decided that Grendel had to be about 18 ft tall to carry 30 warriors, then of course the hall had to be big, or he wouldn't have fit through the door.
And that makes me edgy as I was pretty sure old English time buildings were pretty small wooden structures, being limited by log size and whatnot.
But there's this old bit of tower behind the art gallery in York that hints that maybe the Saxon types could build stuff? Anyway... Her's day 2 Grendel outside the hall, which is obviously in the wrong order, but who cares.
Grendel ipad version.
15 years ago I was all about the dodge and burn, now it's all Autodesk inking pen, and layers of semi opaque stuff, and white highlights.
25 years ago it would have been rotring pens and ink, and lightboxes and whatnot.
I've been looking at the story of Beowulf, and thinking I could use it to have a theme for each day of Inktober. And I even dug up the first version of Beowulf I ever read, way back in Primary school, in the Janet and John Brave and Bold tales. I remember being confused by the images, and trying to copy one where Beowulf is doing what looks like a Judo throw on Grendel. Anyway. I read it and got stuck on the bit where Grendel carries off 30 warriors (handy number for Inktober).
And I got to thinking how big Grendel would have to be to carry 30 warriors, and so that's where I am.
Big Grendel and the possibility of 30 warriors previously unnamed.
The thing about real paper and ink is there isn't an undo button. You can white stuff out, assuming you can find your jar of dried up white-out, which I couldn't, or you can stick a bit of paper over stuff.
So I allowed myself the luxury of a quick edit in Autodesk Sketchbook to tidy up a fraction.
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I was quite shocked recently when I realised I'd not done inktober since 2018... that's a long time.
I think I got distracted teaching robots to draw cats or something
In fact I've done very little actual drawing, especially not on computers.
So I bought some bic biros, and had a punt.
I was looking at Instagram, (which I haven't posted to since 2021) to keep up with what my friends at Uni of Brighton (I like to see what Philippa Lyon is up to ) and noticed my account still pointed at an old url.
So I changed it to https://strangebiros.blogspot.com/ rather than www.strangebiros.co.uk which I had as a domain for years, till I realised I didn't give a fig if people actually read any of this guff or not.
Then I started thinking about where Strange Biros came from.
It was a small press comic launched at the 1991 UK Comic Art Convention by me and my friend Paul Putner.
Indie comics were having a revival then, and we made a comic, printed off a batch and drove to the convention in London in a vintage Mercedes, Paul dressed as Judge Death, Adrian dressed as a purple man from 2000AD.
That Merc is probably worth a million pounds now, then it wasn't.
They dressed up to take part in what would eventually evolve into a cosplay competition, but they didn't get round to that bit, and just looked a bit weird all day.
We had an interesting time, attended the 2000AD session, and the artists alley, and left the stash of 'Strange Biros' comics with a bloke from the Small Press collective... and never heard from him again.
At the time we started an application to the Prince's Youth Business Trust to ramp up the production, but Paul became a smash hit actor starring in Run for Your Wife in London's West End, and I got married.
I'll see if I can dig out a copy of issue #1 and post some pictures here.
Following on from the Fake Sharks, or possibly before, can't remember I did a bunch of sharks in the Rocketboom Bears book... Nazi Space sharks;
https://books.apple.com/ca/book/rocketboom-bears/id1406133567
It's there in apple books, but I thought there was a pdf version somewhere.
