MONASTIC MENAGERIE

During Goblin Week 2019 I drew a goblin that was a shrew-like creature wearing a baggy robe and holding a spoon, that I creatively called Shrewblin. I liked it enough that it became an occasionally reoccurring character. It wasn't meant to be a monk but the line between a ratty little goblin robe and a monk's habit is surprisingly thin.

By 2023 I started drawing more shrew and shrew-adjacent critters, often also wearing little robes and hoisting tiny glasses of wine, Eduard von Grützner style. In 2024 and 2025 the cast expanded to incorporate other groups of animals that I thought would look cute in little robes, with Brother Gregor the gharial and Brother Ignatz the bittern being the first two to receive actual names. They weren't originally intended to occupy the same world as the semi-monastic shrews I'd been drawing but one thing led to another and everything got kind of smushed together into a single not particularly coherent setting that my partner dubbed the Monastic Menagerie.

I'm not sure why critter monks were the thing that snowballed from a handful of doodles into a subject that's dominated the majority of my artistic output for over two years now. I'm not a religious person but I've always found something charming and appealing about the idea of a simple monastic life, or at least its secular aspects. I don't imagine my critter monks as literal catholics or members of any real world religion for that matter, but in my mind this monastery is more of a gentle frat house or commune for silly little guys that don't fit into regular society and can just spend their days gardening, making wine and cordials, illuminating books, and so on. The franciscan style robes and other mendicant affectations are just some cosmic coincidence, ultimately because I like drawing them. My monks probably have some kind of spiritual beliefs but of something much gentler than medieval catholicism.

Finally a disclaimer: due to the impulsive and piecemeal nature of the worldbuilding, and my inability to care that much about realism or consistency, you're just going to have to accept that a crocodile guy is only a few times larger than a shrew guy, but a beetle being used as a draft animal is larger than either of them. Some critters are big, some are small. Some animals are people and some animals are animals. There is no underlying logic to any of this other than I draw whatever I think is fun and don't care to invest the energy to justify it. I'm just having fun!