DARK YOUNG

DARK YOUNG OF SHUB-NIGGURATH

"'Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath!Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!'"

H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer In Darkness

"That's as close as I can come. The mouths was like leaves and the whole thing was like a tree in the wind, a black tree with lots of branches trailing to the ground, and a whole lot of roots ending in hoofs. And that green slime dribbling out of the mouths and down the legs was like sap!"

"It came crawling up the hillside to the alter and the sacrefice, and it was the black thing of my dreams-that black ropy, slimy, jelly tree-thing out of the woods. It crawled up and it flowed up on its hoofs and mouths and snaky arms. And the men bowed and stood back and then it got to the alter where they was something squirmin on top, 

squirming and screaming."

Robert Bloch, Notebook Found In a Deserted House

This creep has been on my list to redraw for a long time. I'm not the biggest fan of Robert Bloch's mythos fiction but this story really strikes a cord. It's all told from the point of view of a child trapped in a shack in the woods as he hears things outside.

There's some idea that the creatures in this story are shoggoths...Bloch even mentions them in the story. However, my reading of it differs. Shoggoths remain in the underground cavern of the "druids" while these creatures roam around the wood like their progenitor Shub-Niggurath. Shoggoths can also shapeshift but in my imagination it's a simple, protoplasmic, blob-like transformation not complex forms like hooves. It seems Chaosium thought these were shoggoths but changed the name to dark young in order to add more creatures to their RPG. While they may have been fudging it for bulk, I thing it's good taxonomy.

The first depiction of these creeps was in the very first publication in Weird Tales in May 1951. We get a gorgeous Lee Brown Coy cover inspired by the story (without monster) and a really cool story header by Matt Fox. His drawing rules! I picture the creatures way less humanoid but it's impossible to argue with how rad this drawing is.

For this redrawing, I fixed anatomy, eliminated superfluous lines and adjusted the color. 

I was very influenced by Tom Sullivan's excellent illustration of the dark young in Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters. Where we differ is that I included the myriad hooves from the text and I wanted the ends of the tendrils to be colorful to add to the tree-like mimicry. Making them akin to the yellow of fall leaves.

Tom Sullivan's work is iconic and really set the template for some more obscure Lovecraftian creatures. I highly recommend checking out his work.