And with that I vanish into silence again. I’m spending the weekend at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival. If you happen to be there too and you know what I look like, say hi!

Here is the second of the three Dr. Bland strips I did for a possible postcard marketing campaign. I don’t remember if the Boss liked them or not. If he did he also thought that they weren’t what he wanted in a marketing campaign.

How did it get to be the first so quickly? And why do my stats tell me that more people visit this journal when I’m not posting than when I am? Ah, the mysteries of the life. I wish I could say that I was back to regular daily posting but it wouldn’t be the truth. I’ve got three days of posting starting today and then it will be back to oblivion. It’s probably going to be that way for the rest of the year.

I found this strip, along with 2 others, when we did a major clean of the office at the Day Job back in August. It’s from the great unfinished comic strip project that I worked on back in 2002 (?) as part of a possible marketing program for the Day Job. First I’d sketched out an 8 page minicomic. With all the distractions at work the turning of those sketches into complete comic pages happened far more slowly than the boss wanted to wait for so he asked if I could come up with some shorter strips that we could use as part of our monthly postcard mailings. Dr. Bland was to be our villain for the minicomic so I gave him a try as the star of his own series. Villains are rather more fun to write than heroes. For the short term at least.

And message is? The answer to all your computer problems? Call CreativeTechs.

Only … not always. We focus on working with the creative industry here in Seattle. We’re Mac experts. We train in and troubleshoot most major design programs (especially CS4). I’ll be happy to talk to you if you call and help you determine if we’re a fit for your needs.

TGIF!

This is what happens when you let your back up server get too full. Fair warning.

This is the first panel of the strip I drew in 2002 focusing on the problems of small to medium sized independent creative studios. The art on this strip never got to the inked stage.

Our hero decides that enough if enough and starts to call his corporate IT department. His co-worker reacts poorly to this idea.

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.

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.