EW had been with the company a few months longer than I had. He was a challenge to cartoon in part because he wasn’t funny looking. That would imply that the other guys were funny looking.

Hmmm. Maybe after I wake up some more I’ll try and articulate my point.

And here is CS in his superhero identity, Doc Swanson. This was the only hero character that I named. Since Swanson is my boss’s last name it seemed like an easy choice.

None of the superheroes had any specific powers. Maybe if the project had had legs we would had thought some up.

CS was and is my boss. This whole techs as superheroes concept was his idea.

And this is KP’s superhero alter ego. With the exception of his face, the parts of him that haven’t transformed into electricity are swathed in black. If I’d thought of a superhero name for him I’ve long since forgotten what it was.

In 2002, there were three techs working for the company; the boss CS, the senior tech KP and the junior tech EW. My job here was to turn them into superheroes. First I had to turn their normal selves into cartoons. I don’t consider myself a good portraitist. I’m about the level of those guys who do quick sketches at the fairgrounds – except I’m much slower.

This is as far as I got on the slingshot “instruction manual”. At this point we realized that we weren’t going to get it together in time for Christmas.

Ah well.

The boss liked to give out fun things to our regular clients for Christmas. The first year he had me paint almost 5 dozen little ceramic pigs. That was inspired by all the huge themed pig statues that were all over Seattle in 2001.

In 2002 he wanted to give out toys. In particular a sort of sling shot. My job was to create a fun little instruction manual. Unfortunately we left planning and purchasing the toys to the last minute and had to abandon that plan. I don’t remember what we gave out instead.

Snow in Seattle is usually something of a joke. We get an inch and the entire city shuts down. This weekend the snow got serious.

Nizzibet and I picked up a new (used) car from her brother in LA on Saturday and started driving north on I5. We stopped for the night about 40 miles north of Sacramento and started driving again on Sunday morning at 5:30 am. At about 1 o’clock, about 250 miles south of Seattle we put chains on the car. Everyone else was doing it. And, even though the road was clear, all the bushes and trees all along the road were covered in ice. We hit snow on the road about 10 miles later. And it was snow all the way north. The snow was falling heavily in Portland so we spent an hour trying to find a friend’s house in order to impose on them. Luckily for them I couldn’t remember how to reach their place and all my phone numbers were at home on the computer. We gave up looking at about the time the snow let up so we headed north again.

Going 180 miles driving no faster than 40 mph makes an already long trip seem even longer. We stopped at a rest stop about 70 miles north of Portland and discovered that somewhere along the way we’d lost the chains off our right front tire. By that time I was going to stop if I could help it and for all we knew the chains had fallen off 5 minutes after we put them on. So we kept going. We finally arrived at home at a little after 1. And then I got to spend the next half hour shoveling snow so I get the car into our parking space.

And the illustration today? It’s showing the difference between the design department (with properly supported computers) and the rest of cubicle farm in a corporation.

The company I work for specializes in providing tech support for graphic designers – single person home studios, multiperson design studios and the creative departments of large corporations. Those creative departments are often the only Macintosh users in company full of PCs. The boss asked me to come up with some illustrations for a campaign he wanted to aim at those creative departments. This image was to illustrate that cubicle life could be lively regardless of the surroundings.

No post tomorrow and maybe not Sunday. I’m going to be on the road with Nizzibet.

2002. I’d been at my “real” job for about a year and my boss was thinking of ways to use my drawing talents. He proposed doing a short comic to advertise our tech support services. These sketches are my attempts to come up with cartoon versions of my co-workers.