Kip Manley contributed a couple of proposals to our package of animation serial ideas. I’ve forgotten the title of the other one (and my memory of its premise is likewise very fuzzy) but Dot Dash was a series paralleling the communications boom sparked by the telegraph back at the turn of 20th century with the then current boom of the internet. I put this cover together in Illustrator, one of the few times I’d used the program for illustration work.
Author Archives: skook
Shangri La
In 1999, Nizzibet was approached by a former colleague from the comics industry. Internet startup money was flying about and he had hooked up with company that planned to make short animations for the web. The cartoons were intended to attract investors who then option/buy the intellectual property featured in those cartoons and make television shows or movies based on them. We were asked to come up with some stories that could be made into serialized cartoons. Each episode was to be six to ten minutes.
We came up with a number of concepts, few of which actually made it to the proposal stage. One that did Shangri La, the story of a young woman and the strange book store she worked in. Nizzibet came up with that one and hopefully will find the time to turn it into a story the rest of the world can read. I did the art for the cover of the proposal. I could be wrong but I think Nizzie colored the art. 
The General
This illustration is from 2001. The old man here was one of the first human villains in that version of King Roach. He was retired general who ran a top secret bioweapons research organization. Among other, more conventional weapons, the organization made monsters. Yes, that was a cliche in 2001 even before that became a basic plot element of every other Scifi (Syfy) movie.
Take a Deep Breath
I don’t remember what PPE stands for anymore. And I’m too lazy to google it this morning.
So Clean You Can Collect Rainwater
Time for our weekend lessons in proper waste disposal. Today’s lesson – if you wouldn’t take a bath in the barrel, you can’t consider it properly cleaned. Keep scrubbing. And watch where you dispose of that cleaning water!
Corporate Creative Department, panel 4
Our hero decides that enough if enough and starts to call his corporate IT department. His co-worker reacts poorly to this idea. 
Corporate Creative Department, panel 3
I’m pretty impressed with the clean lines in this strip. I have a tendency to noodle and add lines – not always to the benefit of the illustration. 
Corporate Creative Department, panel 2
At the time I did these illustrations I was really enamored with the idea of creating individual illustrations on paper, scanning the images and then using Photoshop and Illustrator to combine the images into comic strips or pages. I’ve since decided that graphics programs are useful for enhancing images and fixing mistakes but I prefer doing as much work as possible on an illustration prior to scanning. 
Corporate Creative Department, panel 1
Corporate creative departments have always been a target market for the company I work for. They tend to have more money to spend on a regular basis than home studios so one corporate client can provide the income that would otherwise require multiple small clients. Corporate clients usually already had an IT department but that department usually had PC/Windows expertise and rarely felt comfortable supporting the Apple computers that the creative departments used. Often the IT departments were glad to have us take the Mac support off their plate.
This strip was the second of three comic strip ideas that my boss had me pull out of the larger, abandoned comic book. I don’t remember what our hero here is upset about but we can assume that it’s computer related. It probably has to do with server issues. Back in 2002 it was usually only our large clients that even had servers. 
Easy Being Green
Another Painter experiment from 2001 or 2002. I don’t remember what I was doing to get that weird rectangle at her eye.
