The profile and the full figure belong to a woman with the nickname “Beastie”. Her imaginary history has altered quite a bit over the years. The original version was that she was a superhero who had been cursed with a trio of demons (one of whom is in the corner of this page) who followed her wherever she went. Sometimes they helped her, sometimes they screwed things up for her. I created her for one of those companies that was jumping in to publishing back in the nineties. They were starting out with a trading card series and going to move on to publishing actual comics from there. It wasn’t a great experience. They initially didn’t want use Beastie because, as a christian company they weren’t comfortable with the whole consorting with demons thing. Then they decided that they weren’t going to do superheroes after all and they cancelled the trading card line. A sympathetic editor made sure I got paid – very late, with a check that the bank almost refused to cash because there was a 50 cent difference between the digital number and the text version.
Don’t know who the guy in the profile is. The sketch on the bottom right is a human/insect hybrid and the sketch on the bottom left looks like a figure gesture of Beastie.
Huh. I don’t remember hearing about this particular brush with publishing. But I suppose having a book (or comic) in hand tends to be proceeded (or accompanied) by more than one such brush.
I believe it happened shortly after Rae and I broke up so it was probably in early 1994. I didn’t devot a lot of attention to it. I think I submitted a couple of characters and this was the acceptable one. For the project’s editor. The project’s publisher had other issues. The company published one set of cards. Beastie got bumped back to the follow-up set that then got cancelled. I probably wouldn’t have cared what happened but I was broke and needed the money so I made sure that the project’s manager knew I was waiting on a check.
This sketch is from 1995 after all the hullabaloo was past.