Creeper, the snivelling, put-upon henchman of the Horned King, gets the full storyboard treatment here in this drawing from The Black Cauldron, Walt Disney Productions' 1985 venture into darker, stranger territory than the studio had attempted in years. Small in scale, this little sheet carries an outsized amount of performance.

The figure has been worked up in ink wash and charcoal, the body rendered in soft grey tones over loose, fast lines, with heavy black scribble laid in around him to set the staging and mood. A storyboard drawing is the rough where the scene is first blocked out, the artist thinking through the timing and the gag before animation ever begins, and this one is alive with that searching energy. There is a real artist's hand at work in the wash, the way the tone is pushed and pulled to give weight to the pose. It is the kind of expressive, atmospheric storyboard work that the film's gothic look demanded.

The sheet is numbered 6 in red at the lower right, marking its place in the sequence, and the pin holes along the edge are the original means of holding the board page on the artist's pegs. Both are exactly what you want to see on a working storyboard of this period, the marks of a drawing that did its job in the room.

The Black Cauldron occupies a peculiar and beloved corner of the Disney story, the film the studio rarely talks about, which is precisely why its production art draws the collectors it does. To find Creeper himself, caught mid-performance at the earliest stage of the picture, is a genuine treat.