About Me

Korshi was born in 8p.m. on 27th May, 1984, in Edinburgh, Scotland. From the age of 11, when glandular fever and malingery forced him to take a year off from school, he has spent most of his waking hours writing and drawing. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia, where he studies Fine Arts and Arts, at the end of which he will be a fully qualified waiter.

U.A.Q.
(Unasked Questions)

Most of these question's I've never been asked, but they are the sort of questions I would ask coming across a site like this.

Tell me more about your sleep-deprived adventures!
Tell you? Let me show you! I have a fotolog, where I (almost) daily post the best photos I've taken of my life.

What should I Iook at first?
If you're new to this site, the quick tour section is designed to give you an idea of what's on it. If you're really, really in a hurry, then I'd say the best stuff to look at is:

Comics
Children of Mars is the comic I'm working on just now. The first ot three parts is ready to read, and I recommend it.
HitoBito is a six-panel, once-weekly comic that you should find dark and funny.
Eleggua is a superhero created by Alex Hernandez; he appears in two comics on this site; Divine Infections is the first, and Blood and Thunder is, from an art point of view, the best.

Pictures
If you're looking for illustrations, the Alice in Underland gallery is the place to go; if you're looking for paintings then I'd point you towards the most recent ones, 2004-2005. The pictures of dragons are also very popular.

Stories
Just my opinion, but I'd say they're all great! The shortest one is Toy Shop; Which I'd paradoxically describe as incomprehensible yet accessible. Hamadryad is slightly longer but also popular, and The Sun, the Moon, the Wolves and the Lovers is a far longer tale in the same vein. Draugr and Beef are both slightly satiric horrors set in the modern day, and if you want something long read Ksasnaja, about one-half of a novel, for my take on a love story.

Where are you from?
Scotland. It says it up there.
Okay, you want the long answer. My mother is Scottish, my father is from Ghana in West Africa, and I was born and grew up in Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland. I spent 2002-2003 living in Japan before moving to Australia.

Where can I buy your work?
Posters of some of my older posters can be bought from Unfamiliar on Candlemaker Row in Edinburgh; if you would like a copy of anything you see on this site (maybe Hexos would look good on your bedroom wall?) give me an email and it can probably be arranged. The same goes if you'd like to comission anything, I seem to be doing quite well with pet portraits (see Tina and Odie).

Why did you make this site?
Well that's a big question... the idea was probably panted in my head when I found out my younger brother had a website of his own and sibling rivalry kicked in. I started learning html when I was living in Japan, with the idea of putting the original Sontag comics online for my family in Australia to see. The website didn't actually come to life for another year, when in January 2003 I learned to use Dreamweaver and put all the paintings and comics I had made in the last year or three on it, with a view to finding work as an artist. The outcome of that particular round of looking can be seen in the pictures and comics in the concept and Eleggua concept galleries.

In short, I spend a lot of my time compulsively drawing and writing, and it seems a waste not to share them. Please feel free to use pics from this site, although credit and a link would be appreciated.

Why is it called "Lair of the Twisted Kitten?
Way back when the internet was first invented, I decided to use it as my email address; it incorporates cats, my favourite animals, and the word twisted, which describes my sense of humour. Obviously someone had beaten me to it (and also to Inner Kitten, my second choice), and the same happened when I decided to use it as my website address. But onceI added "Lair of the" it was a completely different story.

What are you working on just now?
This site! But after it's done, my priorities are i) catching up with HitoBito, which despite my best efforts to update monthly, is usually late, and ii) get to work on Children of Mars, my latest collaboration with Alex Hernandez, a far-future samurai comic. Look at this picture for a flavour of it; the first part of it should be online around October, and will be awesome. Sometime in the future I'd also like to rewrite and illustrate Ksasnaja, finish writing Chanson Joyeuse, a dark fantasy story set in the middle ages, and finish Candy and Sontag/Shadow Ganger.

What are your influences?
Great question, glad you asked. For comics, the answers are obvious- Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Dave McKean, Frank Miller, Pat Mills; on particular comic like The Sandman, Swamp Thing, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Slaine, X-statix, Hellboy; I could go on for much longer, but these are the ones that come to mind first.

In terms of art, there are probably far too many to name, but Mucha, Klimt and Munch are, again, the ones that come to mind. I'd also like to mention Brom, for elevating Fantasy illustration to art.

For writing, H. P. Lovecraft stands out as the first writer to make me really afraid. I couldn't sleep alone for a week after reading a collection of his, I'm ashamed to admit, and whenever I think of horror, or indeed any genre that aims to produce an emotional response I ask myself "What would H. P. do?" Robert Rankin is another author who I read religiously, for managing to create monstrously mad, brilliant plots from tangled threads of pop-culture references, consipracy theories and anything else he can get his hands on; his books are hilarious and disturbing. Ian M. Banks is third in my list, as a brilliant (sometimes inconsitent) author; Whit and the Culture novels changed my outlook on life, and the Wasp Factory made me cringe. Lastly, I'd like to mention Salman Rushdie as a retrospective influence; I started reading him recently and realised that he'd spend some time doing what I was attempting.

What is a Hamadryad/Draugr/Hexos/Ksasnaja etc.?
There are a lot of strange words on this site, and if you don't know what all of them mean, it doesn't mean you're stupid, it just means that you were probably out doing fun, cool stuff while I was locked in my room reading the Target series of Doctor Who books. A hamadryad is an oak nymph, a longer word for a dryad. A draugr is a Scandinavian vampire, a revenant corpse. Hexos, coming from the Greek word for six, is the name of a character who would have eventually appeared in Sontag, if I had ever finished writing it. He is one of a group of daemons from Greek Mythology called Dactyls, created when the goddess Rhea dug her fingers into the earth. In the myth there are ten of them, one for each finger, but according to folklore witches (and it's not too much of a stretch to call Rhea a witch) often have a sixth finger. So Hexos (short for Hexadactylos) is the deformed offspring of that vestigial sixth digit. Whew... And Ksasnaja is a made up name for a made-up Indian goddess. Pronounced Ksashnaya, it's a combination of Kshastriya and Naga, two words of Indian origin that I think sound nice.

And if you have any other questions about words, email me about it or look it up on google.

And if you can think of any other questions I haven't asked, have any comments, suggestions or criticisms, email me at korshi_dosoo@yahoo.co.uk