When I was a child I had a small flip book—a kind of notebook bestiary. Each page was smudged and brimming with portraits made of wings and teeth, of sunflower petals and horns: desires made up of scales and yellowed toenails abutting soft green flesh. I realize now they were reflections of something I did not understand, and collected from ideas of a world that seemed breathtakingly huge and possible.

In hindsight, they betrayed my desperate urge to create something that had never existed before.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve never stopped drawing monsters. But largely, these reflections have shifted from those creatures that do not exist to those that do, albeit ones that are mangled and magnified into ridged, and painful constructions...