Joe DeVito writes:

A little over a week ago I posted a shot of my Kong armature and his alter ego, the body suit that I sculpted to cover it with. The armature was made by Jeff Taylor and is a marvelous work of art all its own. The rubber suit, though crude looking, when wrapped around the armature made a functional, movable prop. I used it as a basic guide for many of the paintings in my book, KONG: King of Skull Island. What follows is a journey into some of what went into its making. With a little luck on my part (re: time!), I hope to follow up with further postings in the weeks to come.

The Beginning of a Long Voyage

Many years ago, I finally made the decision to seriously pursue doing a prequel/sequel to the original King Kong story. The two main things that needed to be locked down were the plot dynamic and the visuals. I knew it was fiction and a central goal was to entertain, but as far as possible I wanted Kong and his world to be plausible. Equally important while delving into the many mysteries of Skull Island was to have fun and encompass many of the interests I’ve had since I was a kid. Alternatively, one of the most intimidating aspects of the book was the awareness that while I was realizing many of my own Kong dreams, I would be tinkering with those of others. With so many Kong fans the world over, all I could do was treat the story with as much respect as possible and hope for the best. All of this was often grueling since it was initially done on top of a full work schedule and required dealing with a myriad of non-creative issues as well. But eventually, it became more enjoyable than I can put into words.

What I want to mainly deal with here are my reasons for visualizing Kong the way I did. To begin I had to decide just what I perceived Kong to be: essentially an enlarged gorilla or a unique species that evolved very differently than modern gorillas. I immediately chose the second course. I have always seen Kong as far more than just a giant gorilla.

This raised several questions that needed to be answered. From an emotional point of view, could Kong ‘love’ Ann Darrow as we would understand it, or was he enthralled by a glimpsed emotion that was frustratingly out of reach? Or was Ann no more than a fascination? Maybe it was all of the above in varying degrees. Another thing I had to consider was the effect of loneliness on a highly intelligent creature. Other than the humans on the island, there was nothing even remotely similar to him; that is so far as the original story reveals (my book needed to be based on the novel, not the movie. This necessarily eliminated the Son of Kong, which would have been problematic in any event). How did this affect his interaction with the natives? My book deals with these less tangible aspects of Kong’s nature and many others in both words and pictures.

The easiest way to broadly explain my approach to portraying Kong is with my house cat scenario: Imagine if someone had never seen a feline other than a house cat. If that person were to envision the thrill and danger of using a ten-foot long house cat in a fantasy action/adventure story, he’d be right – what a fascinating and dangerous creature a ten-foot house cat would be. Yet how much cooler and more intimidating is a lion or a tiger! With their enlarged heads and paws, their deep throated roars instead of meows, and their increased muscle mass, etc. they compellingly transform the look of a normal house cat into something altogether more dramatic and dynamic. To my mind Kong should be the same in relation to an ordinary gorilla that a lion or a tiger is to a house cat; not just physically, but also in temperament and attitude.

There are other circumstances that would have pushed the envelope even farther away from that of a regular gorilla, such as diet and the dangers involved with growing up on an island populated by dinosaurs. Both would definitely be reflecting in Kong’s appearance. But more basic still, how could he exist there in the first place? Since I sought to create a believable scenario in this regard, a rough paleontological backstory is called for here:

Late in the Triassic Period of the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs began. At the end of the Mesozoic, over 160 million years later, the dinosaurs became extinct. The Mesozoic Era, which began @248 million years ago, was divided into three Periods: the Triassic (@248-213 million years ago), the Jurassic (@213-144 million years ago) and the Cretaceous (@144-65 million years ago). So after a roughly 160 million year reign, the dinosaurs finally died out 65million years ago.

What is not known to many is that mammals and dinosaurs evolved at the same time. Most know what the characteristics of mammals are (hair, live birth, warm bloodedness, etc.). The main evolutionary feature that defined the dinosaur was in its hip and leg structure. Instead of their legs being splayed off to the side as in crocs and lizards, dinosaur legs had swung underneath their bodies to establish a straight line in relation to the hip, knee and foot like on a horse, or better still, an ostrich since the first dinosaurs were two legged. This enabled them to dramatically increase their speed and overall agility. Extraordinary recent finds have also confirmed what was always suspected by the new generation of paleontologists. Compared to the archosaurs from which they evolved and other reptiles, dinosaurs had the hyper efficient cardiovascular and respiratory systems needed to fuel their increased energy requirements. They literally stood head and shoulders above other like-sized reptiles. Note: Technically dinosaurs are confined to land. The fascinating array of pterosaurs and the incredible diversity of sea going creatures that co-habited their saurian world were not dinosaurs.

Rising up on two hind legs also left two limbs free for grabbing things (some later developed a four legged stance, but the hip structure remained characteristic). That’s a pretty devastating combination of assets – especially when augmented by sharp eyesight and snapping jaws lined with sharp teeth. They were fast, coordinated and aggressive. The bottom line was that when the newly evolved mammals and the newly evolved dinosaurs went head to head in a battle for world domination, the mammals got their tails (sic) kicked. The dinosaurs won claws down and quickly filled every evolutionary niche bigger than a chicken to the virtual complete exclusion of mammals. Throughout that time mammals were forced to crawl in their shadows, never reaching a size larger than a small badger (so far as we know). It wasn’t until the dinosaur’s extinction that mammals got a break - which they quickly took advantage of.

That time came when a huge meteor, several miles in diameter, struck the earth @65 million years ago. It became an instrumental factor in wiping out a great deal of life on earth, including the dinosaurs (I’m discounting birds here for those who consider them modified dinosaurs). This ended the Mesozoic Era. What followed was the Cenozoic Era. This era is divided into a Tertiary Period and a Quaternary Period. The Tertiary Period covers a vast expanse of time and is divided up into several epochs. The Quaternary Period has really just started (some two million years ago) with the Pleistocene Epoch. That Epoch lasted until @10,000 years ago and was followed by the Holocene Epoch, which we are still living in today.

During the span of the Cenozoic some truly fascinating and gigantic mammals evolved. At least one of them, Indricotherium - which was a member of the rhino family and weighed in at over thirty tons - grew as large as some of the largest dinosaurs. Over the last 65 million years, mammals have not only grown and diversified into every niche formerly occupied by the dinosaurs, but also into those that weren’t such as the sea and air (as mentioned earlier, evidence indicates dinosaurs lived only on land).

All of this eventually led to primates, which finally led to us. Primates are characterized by forward pointing eyes for stereo-scopic vision, an enlarged brain, grasping hands and feet and a grasping tail. Some paleontologists believe, on the basis of fossil cheek teeth, that there may have been a squirrel sized primate as far back as the Late Cretaceous (65+ million years ago) which belonged to a group called plesiadapiforms. More reliable evidence of primates dates back to the early Eocene over 55 million years ago.

The earliest known ape dates from about 17 million years ago. The largest ape that we know of lived in Asia (India and China) and is called Gigantopithecus. It may have been over 8 feet high. So far as I can find out, however, there is nothing in the fossil record from about 14 to 4 million years ago. The gorilla and the chimpanzee have no fossil record at all! Scientists presume that they diverged from the same line humans branched from some time during that 10 million year gap. DNA tests indicate that the chimp is our closest relative with the gorilla a close second and that we diverged from them around 7-5 million years ago. Modern humans, insofar as our discoveries indicate, emerged as little as 150,000 years ago.

As is evident, our science is far from all encompassing. A great deal of the ‘facts’ we encounter in casual reading and conversation are really no more than suppositions. At best they are plausible explanations that last only until the next discovery comes along.

So how does a creature like Kong figure into this dynamic – and on an island at that? As is evidenced by the dinosaurs themselves, gigantism is one of nature’s favorite methods of ensuring survival. But how could Kong – a giant mammal - have evolved at the same time given the above scenario? And given Kong’s existence there, what would he have had to do to survive and how would those things affect the way he looked? The questions in my mind went on and on.

While giving my answers to such questions here would ruin the book’s story, there’s no problem with going into my reasons for Kong’s appearance since images have been out for a while now. Ideas began to form from day one. My initial takes were these two small sketches done almost fourteen years ago:

Joe DeVito: The Beginning of a Long Voyage

Because of the incredible world he lived in, my thinking then and now was that Kong was not a vegetarian. I saw Kong as being omnivorous, maybe even primarily a carnivore. This would have a profound effect on his anatomy, particularly in the look of his stomach. Unlike the huge vat of a gut that is a characteristic of gorillas (used for stewing massive amounts of vegetation), if Kong were primarily carnivorous he would be leaner in that area. Plus it just looks cool.

Another thing clearly reflected in his expression is, euphemistically speaking, a bad attitude. In keeping with his huge size and the need to survive in a world populated with the greatest predators ever to stalk the earth, I believe Kong’s personality needed to be utterly different than a regular gorilla. This difference could also be an extension of his taste for meat, which would require the psychology to hunt and kill often.

Perhaps the most obvious characteristic in these initial sketches is Kong’s upright gate. I gave him proportionately longer legs to facilitate this. To quote an old axiom: “Man stands alone because alone he stands.” I imagine King Kong might have begged to differ. I also initially gave him a broader chest and shorter arms than a regular gorilla as well.

These were some of the things that helped form my eventual decision on how to paint Kong. My next step was to expand on these and other sketches. Eventually I created a movable puppet to be used as a guide for the various images of Kong throughout my book.
Please stay tuned for more, hopefully in a week or so.

Coming next: Meeting Jeff Taylor and acquiring a fantastic stop-motion armature on which to sculpt a Kong prototype. Pictures of the process and much more.