The Kaiju Portraits was a little side project that, while not as important as my upcoming comic works, is something I plan to keep at until the day I die. Basically they're anime-style portraits of giant monsters and related characters from all over the map of fiction. Instead of featuring all of them one at a time by completion order, I think it be way more eye catching to do these as multi-character compilations for DeviantArt instead:

Guilala: Kaiju Portrait #8

During the late 1960's, in the hights of the 'Kaiju Boom', the Japanese studio Shochiku, most well known for their classy samurai flicks (and later in the 1970's for erotic thrillers of questionable class) got into the act with "The X from Outer Space". The story concerned the spaceship AAB Gamma and its crew of swinging scientists sent to investigate recent Earth ship disappearances by a UFO around the orbit of Mars. They come in contact with the glowing saucer (possibly a left over prop from Shochiku's "Goke: Bodysnatchers from Hell") and survive the encounter, only to return to Earth with a spore left by the alien ship. The spore, once expose to Earth's atmosphere, grows and becomes a gigantic chicken-lizard like monster dubbed Guilala, who then goes on a berserk rampage across Japan, while those same groovy scientist try to find a way to halt the beast.

I have to admit, the film isn't as fun as it sounds...in fact we spend way too much time sipping martinis on the moon with the human heroes...but the monster Guilala was memorable enough to become its own little classic in the world of Japanese monsters. He is a very wacky design indeed, and like Christopher Lee and the recent Doctor Who revival, Guilala's fans must have grown up to become movie directors and producers, because the green space chicken will return in 2008's "Guilala's Counterattack: The Touyaku Summit One-Shot Crisis". The bizarre title reflects the more comedic approach of this film, as it's being directed by Minoru Kawasaki, the man behind such entertaining films like "The Calamari Wrestler" and "Everything BUT Japan Sinks". More information can be found in the links below:

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Guilala is quite appealing in his Martian silliness, and although I may have gotten his colors wrong, it still remains one of my more favorite additions to the Kaiju Portraits!

Lipstick Songtress / Lipsyncher: Kaiju Portrait #27

Kaiju Portrait #27 features what else, a hot kaijin babe from Super Sentai and its Power Rangers affiliate...but then again what do you expect from me? Lipstick Songstress first appeared in episodes 5-6 of the 1993 series "Dairanger", "The Jewels Have Come" and "Wind, Cut Through!" respectively (stop laughing). She is a member of the Gorma Tribe, ancient Chinese sorcerers who return in modern times and can assume more monstrous forms in battle, which for no apparent reason, the vast majority are cycloptic furniture headed beings. Obviosuly Lipstick Songtress is based on the cosmetic product, and is one of the few Gorma whose human form was not shown. She's a minion of the Gorma witch Lt. Colonel Gara, and true to her looks, she was extremely vain and could sing a soprano tone so destructive that at the very least could damage her enemies' eardrums.

She was killed off by the title heroes, the Dairangers, with their giant mythical robots, but later was resurrected by the playing card-based Gorma villain Duke of Trumps in the short "Gosei Sentai Dairanger the Movie". But she was again killed, along with several other returning Gorma kaijin, by Duke of Trumps himself, as they were forcefully absorbed by him to create the powerful Great King Ojaru. And of course, came the second season of the American series "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" when they ran out of funds for newer, Japanese co-produced footage (known as 'Zyu 2' in fan circles) and resorted to adapting footage from "Dairanger".

In the episode "Two For One", she was called Lipsyncher and was created from Trini's (the Yellow Ranger) 'Siren Song Red' lipstick through Lord Zedd's magic. I have to admit, Lord Zedd creating monsters from furniture is a lot more realistic then Chinese masters of the dark arts becoming furniture-headed. Anyway, like her Japanese original she was very vain and was destroyed by the Ranger's Thunder Zords while in giant form. And she returns YET AGIAN in the US made Super NES video game "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition", where her design was made more appealing then her live action counterpart, I'd even go as far as to say she was pre-Dead-Or-Alive video game goodness! The picture above is a mix of the video game and live action versions.

UPDATE: Fellow DevaintArt member Dr. Zock ( [link] ), whose actually seen Lipstick Songtress in action (or as he affectingly calls her Kuchibeni-chan...oh, how sweet), offers his welcomed insight on the character in this following comment;

Now I really don't want to seem like a nit-picker, especially on such a fun pic, but I did notice two tiny inconsistencies in your description of Kuchibeni-chan. For one, I think episode 6 is "The Jewels Have Come" and that the episode she first appears in is titled "What a Headache!". I'm not sure though. The other one, and it's even more insignificant, is that while she never appears in human form in the TV series, she does get one brief appearance as a human in the Dairanger movie, shortly before she enlarges with Trump Koushaku and the others. (She looks like an Arabian belly dancer with comically large lips.) If you want to make changes to the description, that's fine, and if you want to completely ignore this, that's also fine.