Creature

Creature is the gnarly, heavy-duty end of skateboarding: horror and gore graphics, B-movie monsters, and that unmistakable toxic green that makes it stand out at a glance among the NHS brands. The skating matches the artwork, a rougher, dirtier take built on hard transition, pools and bowls with plenty of wild street mixed in. That blend of pool heritage and wild street skating has been the brand’s DNA from the start.

History

Russ Pope, an artist and former Santa Monica Airlines team manager, founded the company in 1994, but he left with the whole team in 1996 to start Scarecrow and that first run faded out in 1998. The Creature people ride today is a second life. In the mid-2000s (around 2005) NHS revived it with Santa Cruz art director Lee Charron and rider Darren Navarrette, who locked in the horror identity and the gnarly tone that still defines it. The relaunch didn’t do things halfway: a run of full-length videos across the years that followed, covered by the likes of Thrasher and Sidewalk, made it obvious what skating for Creature meant, hard transition, pools, bowls and a rougher take on street. Creature is distributed by NHS, the same parent company as Santa Cruz, based in Santa Cruz, California.

The team

The historic transition core is Darren Navarrette, David Gravette, Willis Kimbel and Al Partanen, genuine bowl and pool skaters. The current roster keeps them and covers every angle with Milton Martinez, Jhancarlos Gonzalez, Collin Provost, Kevin Baekkel, Stu Graham, Sam Hitz, Cody Lockwood, Ulph Andersson, Vincent Matheron, Sota Tomikawa and Grace Marhoefer. The biggest milestone belongs to Milton Martinez, from Mar del Plata, Argentina, who won Thrasher’s Skater of the Year in 2019 while riding for Creature. Looking back, the team also ran early riders like Jason Adams, who left to help start Scarecrow, and Barker Barrett; Chris Russell is widely associated with the brand too.

Decks and construction

NHS runs its own U.S. woodshop and is one of the presses that turns out its brands’ decks, though not every line is confirmed as USA-made. Shapes tend to run wide and durable, built for people who skate hard. For anyone who wants extra life out of a board, the VX construction uses 5 plies of North American maple with two layers of Quad X tech, thinner and stronger than a standard 7-ply. If you want a board made to take a beating in transition, it’s worth comparing Creature’s decks against the rest before you commit.