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Today’s 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual Sketch is the extremely irritating rust monster.

What’s great about the rust monster is that it can’t actually hurt you – and yet it’s one of the most feared monsters in the dungeon. This is because the rust monster eats metal and is particularly fond of “ferrous based metals such as iron, steel, and steel alloys (such as mithral and adamantite arms and armor).”

In other words, it wants your armour and weapons – and one touch of its long antennae causes anything metal to rust and corrode, immediately falling to pieces “which are easily eaten and digested by the creature.” Fighting back is not a good idea, because “weapons striking a rust monster are affected just as if the creature’s antennae had touched them.”

Small wonder that a band of tough adventurers will often run at the first sight of a rust monster; unfortunately, most quickly learn that the rust monster moves much faster than they do. The most effective way of dealing with one is to throw a handful of iron spikes (or other easily replaced metal items) in its path and hope it will stop long enough to eat them that you’ll be able to get away with that precious +4 sword.

I’ve never understood quite what’s going on with the rust monster’s tail. In the original illustration by David C Sutherland III, it looks for all the world like a propeller. Later versions tried to turn it into something impressive and insectoid, but if you ask me, Sutherland’s version is the best, because it gives the rust monster a ridiculous – almost nerdy – look. Ol’ Rusty never hurts anyone; he’s the harmless annoying doofus everyone wants to avoid.

Legend has it the rust monster was designed when Gary Gygax found a bag of cheap plastic monster toys in a dime store, including a “figurine that looked rather like a lobster with a propeller on its tail…. [N]othing very fearsome came to mind…. Then inspiration struck me. It was a ‘rust monster.’” I’m sure his gaming group was delighted when Rusty first turned up and started munching on their stuff.

BTW, one day I might buy one of these t-shirts.

This was a commissioned Monster Manual sketch. If you want to commission your own monster drawing, I’m still taking requests (for a limited time) here.

The Good News: The Magic Pen got a great write-up on io9.com on Saturday, causing hordes of keen readers to rush here eager to read it (or possibly just to look at dirty pictures).

The Bad News? This overloaded our servers and the site went into meltdown. Things are still a bit patchy, I’m afraid, but we’re working on getting the site back to full health. Apologies if things are a little slow in loading, or if you get error messages instead of comics. Hopefully it will all be sorted out ASAP.

Leonard walking to the Hogan’s Alley Day party, dressed as Captain Tomorrow. Highlights include: some clumsy drawing, lots of stars in the night sky (each one drawn with white-out and then touched up with ink), more white-out in panels 2 and 3 (where the drawing was even clumsier than usual), a general air of mystery.

Sam is visiting Dick Burger’s studio, where penciller Zack shows him the Captain Tomorrow page he’s working on. Then it’s a quick tour of Dick’s awards (“Eisners, Harveys and a couple of Emmys for the Captain Tomorrow TV Series!”) before heading outside to the pool. More clumsy drawing, but I’m rather fond of this scene nevertheless.

By the way, Dick’s swimming pool (with its series of artificial waterfalls – see page 58) was designed by Dick to resemble a stream that flows just South of Hicksville (a fact I never got around to mentioning in the book itself). You can see this stream in the endpaper maps; there’s also a tiny glimpse of the stream in a flashback on page 224 (panel 5).

These last two pages are a sequence, so if you’re mad keen you could even buy them together.

Sam finds Grace in her garden. Note more clumsy drawing (hell, it was a long time ago I drew these pages!), Sam smoking (I’ve never smoked, and I’m still not sure why I made him a smoker – I wouldn’t today), card pasted over an ill-considered sun in panel one. Also, the first shoots of Emil Kopen’s Bekjai flowers appearing in the sand (as seen in full flower in the final chapter).

Sam demonstrates his amazing powers of observation (although to be fair, the gag about Grace’s hairstyle requires careful study of several flashbacks to make sense) and Grace her impatience. Still more clumsy drawing and the book’s sole Puschkinia reference (apart from the glossary). Also, Grace calls Sam “Boy Wonder” (another running gag). Also also, if you peel up the last panel (which is pasted on), you’ll see the earlier version (an aerial view of Sam and Grace starting to work in the garden), which I roughly pencilled and started to ink before changing my mind and going with the simpler view.