I’ve now been back at the day job for a week. I’m feeling the usual aches and pains that come from mostly sitting and driving for hours. Neither my shoulder or my back are adding to those complaints so I guess I’m officially healed. I am trying to using to use my left arm as much as possible. And be more careful about how I pull heavy boxes out of the back of the truck. So far, so good.
Progress on my art projects has dropped quite a bit but that was to be expected. I get a little bit done every day. Eventually that adds up to finished illustrations and that gets noted on the spreadsheet.
| Project | Count | Complete |
| Outland Saints (comic) | 40 pages | 12 pages |
| John Bell’s Oz Book (illustrations) | 27 illustrations | 20 illustrations |
| Mighty Nizz: Getting Dressed (comic) – 18 pages | 18 pages | 5 pages |
| Mighty Nizz: Tarot Deck (tarot deck) | 78 cards | 4 cards |
| Skookworks Webstore | 248 designs | new store in progress |
| Bastard Destiny (comic) | 48 pages | 8 pages |
| Sunk Cost Elegy (comic) | 120 pages (tentative) | |
| The Surrilana Depths (comic) | 200 pages (tentative) | |
| Daughter of Spiders (illustrated short story series) – number of stories, word count and number of illustrations to be determined. | ||
| Colonial Cthulhu (Keeper’s and Companions Manuals) | 2 covers | DONE! |
| Observations (comic) | 8 pages | DONE! |
If you’ve been taking note of my progress spreadsheet you’ve seen “Bastard Destiny” making progress. I hadn’t planned to add anything else to the spreadsheet until I finished at least one of the projects that are already on it. As with most of my plans I was compelled to make it more complicated.
Over at my Substack account I make daily posts featuring art from my computer archives. Last month I posted the art from an abandoned project I called “Barbarians vs Dinosaurs”. It was the first eleven pages of a graphic novel written by a fellow that I used to collaborate with a lot. He had story ideas, he usually paid me and … none of those projects were ever finished. We had agreed that I could use the art on a new project if I came up with a new story.
Outland Saints is one of those. Sunk Cost Elegy is another. Bastard Destiny has become the third such revival and, honestly, it’s the easiest. Unlike Saints there’s no dialogue to rewrite. Sunk Cost has a hundred pages requiring a lot of story restructuring and additional art. Assuming I try to use all the existing art.
The original idea behind “Barbarians vs Dinosaurs” was to have a company go questing for a cure for a plague. They would go to a distant land where the people coexisted with, and often had domesticated, dinosaurs.
When I posted these character sketches (and the penciled pages I will post next week) I was just filling space. I’ve already got two projects that feature dinosaurs. Adding a third seemed like I’d be typecasting myself.
But there are no dinosaurs in those first eleven pages. The new story didn’t have to feature dinosaurs. It could go in new directions with new creatures! Thus have I given myself more work.
