Last update, we looked at Cthyllamon, the SPOOKY new counterpart to Marin angemon, making it a more accurately menacing "sea angel" and tied with the final stage of Jellymon as the first Ultimate level Digimon with the motif of a marine invertebrate. Those are some mighty specific claims to fame...yet it already wasn't alone, either. Even before Cthyllamon was revealed, we learned that a new film, Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning, would introduce Ukkomon, a child-stage Digimon with an unmistakable shape.

It was assumed by many that Ukkomon must have some canon connection to Marin Angemon, but that still would have been a bit strange; they have the same animal basis, similar color schemes and they're roughly the same size, but they have no stylistic similarities at all! Ukkomon doesn't read in any way as an earlier stage for Marin, but like an entirely new, independent concept for a Clionidian Digimon, and that's precisely what it is.

The story goes that Ukkomon was the real first-ever Digimon to make contact with a human child in our own world, and the form of a sea angel was chosen to give it the feeling of a "primordial" organism. It was given the traditional early Digimon eyes, deliberately the same color as Agumon's, and jagged Digimon "ears" that started showing up a little further into the franchise. It also has a sad, dumpy face, fat cheeks drooping over a little toothless frown of a mouth, to make it look more pitiful and heart-wrenching, but don't fall for it! Or do, I don't know. The plotline of The Beginning is as dark and bittersweet as any classic Digimon storytelling, and if you're reading this you might care enough about Digimon that you won't want me to completely spoil it. Suffice to say, that first meeting between a Digimon and a child gets quite a bit more grim than you would have expected, or perhaps exactly as grim as you expected if you're a big enough fan. This isn't to say Ukkomon is evil, but it certainly gets sinister.

In fact, of Ukkomon's two main abilities, one is just "Whirlpool Spin," which attacks like a top, while the other is "Liar Dream," which is simply mind control. There's a red flag! Already this is a ghastlier gastropod than Marin Angemon, and definitely more disturbing than the cartoon villainy of Cthyllamon!

Ukkomon is apparently also a survivor of the "original" Digital World, or at least "a" Digital World that came before the current one, the only creature retaining memories of this ancient and extinct realm. According to digital legend, it even helped shape that realm to begin with by granting the wishes of other digital lifeforms, a benevolent little god who was once loved and adored before cataclysm struck.

All this, and we're still just talking about a child stage! I've already set you up to expect an Ultimate, and we already name dropped "Big Ukkomon." So just what happens when an Ukkomon evolves up to its maximum potential, if it's absolutely nothing like our other Cliones?

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At first glance, Big Ukkomon is "only" a huge massive sea angel, fatter and chunkier than Ukkomon. It has tinier ears, it drops the shock of anime hair and drops the little claws on its now much longer fins, it adds some unsettlingly humanlike square teeth in its little cute mouth, and its eyes are now grown over with two lumps of featureless skin! I've always been a big fan of eyeless flesh lumps, personally, to the point that I overused them in my own monster designs for years before I dialed them back a little.

Big Ukkomon isn't a full blown hellspawn nightmare beast, but you can tell something isn't quite right with it. It's a sea angel leaning just a little less towards Biblical Cherub Angel and more towards Evangelion Doomsday Angel.

But when I talked about Cthyllamon, I talked at length about how important the barbed, retractable tentacles are to the Clionidae, and how delighted I was that Cthyllamon remembered to include them even as only a few wiggly green tongues.

So...does THIS sea angel do the thing???

...If you didn't already see what you're about to see, I hope you'll be as thrilled to bits as I was.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Holy shit does it DO THE THING. I thought we'd seen some sick as hell Digimon lately but this is sick as hell for any media franchise. This is sick as hell by the standards of creature design and anime artwork as a whole. The entire head peels open like a flower, the interior lining carpeted wall to wall with teeth as thick as the spines of a durian. From within this ring of fang-caked petals erupt ten longer, thinner tentacles lined just as wickedly with little fangs, and in the very center is a mass of thinner, ropier yellow tendrils so numerous and so long that they seem to surge upwards like a liquid geyser of squirming flesh!

This tentacle cluster parts vertically at the base, like a set of curtains, to reveal and ominous cylindrical form wrapped in a cloak-like membrane of flesh, which I'd almost liken to the shape of a pitcher plant's trap, and I guess it might be meant to evoke a humanoid figure at the center of the whole thing, ominously abstracted and vague. Finally, Ukkomon's pudgy body is now encircled with large, vertical mouths full of even more teeth.

While it doesn't beat my personal affection for Parasimon, I officially consider Big Ukkomon the new coolest looking, scariest, and most beautifully designed Ultimate Digimon in the series. I would also like to go on record as saying that this cosmic horror mollusk is more visually stunning and significantly more terrifying than any other cosmic horror mollusk I've seen in any other work of fiction, downright humiliating your average interpretation of Cthulhu. It barely feels "Digimon Style" at all, which has been deliberately the case for a number of Digimon's would-be world-enders, but none of its other Doomsday Boys come close to how threatening this mere sea-slug has proven to be.

I kept saying that molluscan Digimon and especially the boneless sea-monster Digimon needed an appropriately menacing Ultimate, but this almost goes so far, it doesn't feel quite right for it to evolve from anything other than regular Ukkomon. Fortunately, Digimon isn't the kind of franchise that cares about this principle at all. As any Digimon can hypothetically rewrite its data enough to end on any conceivable Ultimate, we can all feel free to imagine this magnificent nightmare of tentacles and teeth as the endgame for any moist shellfish in the series.

They're all just biding their time...

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