I'm not even sure where to begin talking about The Slime King. He's definitely the ensemble dark horse of Blasphemous Saga Fantasy, and that's probably due to me playing favorites. I can't get enough of the guy. Originally he was just a throwaway gag, but he's gone from a villain without a cause to a much more complex character, and I've got a lot more in store for him.
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The Slime King's life began in 2004, when I was taking Intro to Animation at MCAD. Our first 'real' assignment was to make an animation that was, at minimum, 30 seconds long (if you've ever done animation before, you know what a feat this actually is for a novice; I am pretty sure I almost died). The animation had to feature a walk cycle and a character (or object) morphing into something else.
I don't really remember what was going through my head. I think my thought process actually began with a witch (yes, that Witch... eventually). I was going to have her tormenting (!) a hapless knight (yep, that Knight... like I said, eventually). I decided that the knight should embody everything dumb about RPGs, so he had really ridiculous hair. You know, like Cloud. I also didn't want to sweat animating the kid so I made him entirely out of circles. The witch was discarded and I decided to have the knight face off against one of my (at the time) standard slimes; if you've played Time Flies, you've seen these guys. The slime was going to morph, Yoshi's Island style, into a giant monster after being injured.
The end result was this:
… and the Slime King was born.
From that point on I really couldn't doodle without drawing those two. I didn't do much with them, and Knight was actually almost totally pushed by the wayside. When it came time to do my final project for the class, I chose to do a short about a kid hounded by monsters after bedtime. The S.K. seemed like a good fit as a cast member.
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Still no crown or cape, though, but the body shape is oddly spot-on here. I settled on round in the end but before that I worked with the elongated shape from the original animation for most incarnations.
The crown, at least, appeared in a comic I did a year later in 2005, about Knight needing to fix his sword. In that one the Slime King has a black crown and is the one who broke Knight's sword in the first place. Apparently he was competent back then.
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It wasn't until that following summer that I did anything with these two again. This was a big turning point for everything: everyone began to settle in their roles and designs, and the series got its title. Up to this point the animation was just called “Knight vs. Slime” and the comic was “Knight in: Busted Sword”. When I went home for the summer in 05 I decided to make a game with them and needed a title. I remembered my first OHR game, intended to be a parody, that ended up being too serious and became Time Flies. That game, of course, was called Blasphemous Saga Fantasy. Not being one to abandon such a fitting name, I reappropriated it.
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At this point there were a few more evolutionary steps; Knight teams up with Witch for the first time, (and, indeed, Witch shows up AT ALL for the first time), and most importantly, The Slime King is relegated from “Ganon” to “Bowser”.
In other words, he was not the primary antagonist, and, in fact, was pretty bad at being an antagonist period. This ended up sticking; I found the blustery, overconfident clown a lot more interesting than the one-dimensional bad guy who was evil for the sake of it.
Of course, he also finally got his cape. The cape had that nondescript white fur with black spots kings are supposed to have. Later on I abandoned this concept because I wanted the HUMAN King to have that cape. Despite all this, he still looked like a frickin' lightbulb, and had those weird bulbous “PSX Cloud Strife” arms.
In early 2006 I did another animation, this one where The Slime King and Knight are a little more balanced in terms of who's the bigger jerk. It uses the same design but definitely exemplifies the turn in his relationship with Knight.
It wasn't until later that year that I finalized The Slime King's design for the 'pilot' comic. In my sketchbook he appears in his 'lightbulb-with-Mega Man-limbs' design twice before I just made him a circle with smoother arms and legs. The comic kind of took care of the rest as I developed a way to draw him over and over easier.
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The Slime King's personality was cemented with this comic as well. He became overconfident, loud, obnoxious, and generally more of a nuisance than a threat. Originally, he was going to somehow humiliate Master Knight; the suggestion to actually kill him off was from my class instructor. I thought it was OK then but I hate it now, so let me say up front that that's one of the first things to be retconned; you can take the Slime King's indignation in the comic when Knight and Witch accuse him of murder at face value; it was definitely someone else.
Five years of development leads us to the Slime King of today, the one people seem to know and love.
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Since then I've been planning a lot for the Slime King. I'm going to just put images up and not explain them very much, feel free to speculate rampantly.
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I can say that the last image there is from a story I'm working on right now. It is very Slime King heavy. I'm looking forward to working on it and every other project I can come up with involving this guy. He's definitely my favorite; I hope he remains just as entertaining to everyone else as he is to me.
Ah... and by the way; if you really need your Slime King fix more often, he's got a twitter account.