The members of the supermarket pharmacy kids club, circa 1997. What were their hopes? Dreams? Did they have families? What sorts of games did they play? Did they have lives beyond the Club? We’ll never know.

Here’s the magical pharmacist and her gang of underage flunkies preparing to bring nutritian, good hygene and the wonders of capitalist medicine to the greenies. There may be a high body count to begin with but history will say it was the right thing to do.

Further attempts at sketching friendly aliens for the kids to educate. Usually when I create an alien species I spend some time thinking about its environment, biology, social structure, etc. Not this time. They just had to be attractive. That is, cute. (And never mind that teaching the aliens to follow human nutritional guidelines might be teaching them to poison themselves.)

From the 1997, this is my first sketches of the client herself. Nizzibet and I were flown down to Berkeley to meet with the client and the woman doing her media development. We spent the day with the four of us in a room. Me sketching. Nizzibet tossing around story ideas and concepts with the client and the media developer. There was a big disconnect in that Nizz is a storyteller, she tells stories that have themes, that concern life changing experiences for the characters within them. The client wanted a series of events that were lively and flashy, that featured her characters and was sort of educational. I got the feeling that the client was a little annoyed that she couldn’t just tell us what to do and be done with it.

And these are various attempts at creating girl characters for the kids club. At this point we hadn’t met our client yet. We’d just been given an outline of what she wanted to do.

With a kids club comic there had to be some sort of story, an adventure for the kids to go on. There were aliens involved. If I remember correctly the kids were going to go to an alien world and (ultimately) help our friendly pharmacist hero teach the aliens about good health and nutrition.

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Hey! While I’m thinking of it, I’d like to compliment our pharmacists at our local Safeway on 15th and 85th. They’re very nice people, they always remember us and, while I can’t say I’m crazy about getting medicine, they certainly make the process as painless as possible. Cheers to them!

I don’t remember how much info we were given to start with for the kids club project. Did the client give us the number of kids (four) and their names? It’s possible. This was my take on Carlos. I don’t think we were given many details on the kids other than to make them multi-ethnic. I don’t remember the client being that interested in the kids actually. Hopefully I’ve just got a poor memory about that.

From here to the end of this sketchbook, about two weeks worth, are a series of sketches that were mostly done in a single day. Back when I was doing active design work at Labor of Love we got a very large potential client in the pharmacy department of a supermarket chain. The project was to do a short comic to go in a giveaway magazine in connection with their kids club. We were to create a set of multi-ethnic kids who were to represent the club. This kid is my first stab at creating one of the characters.

The cute little creature on the right is one of the Legion of Sarahs. The other two sketches are the usual mysterious guest appearances of unmet strangers.

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I now have a myspace account. At some point I’ll figure out how to muck with it so it looks more like this blog. I signed up because Schuyler and Leif and Derek all had accounts. I’ve since discovered Jason and Patrick and David (and a few other folks who haven’t responded to my friending yet) on the ‘space. I like seeing the faces (or whatever image they’re using to represent themselves) of people I know. I expect that this blog will remain my blog. Sooner or later I’ll actually set up my own website. Sooner or later.

From the 1997 sketchbook, a page of Misspent Youths characters. I’ve come to (mostly) accept that I have a cartoony style. When I’m just drawing, not thinking about trying to acchieve a specific look, my art has a cartoony flavor. It has a cartoony flavor even when I’m trying to draw something serious and horrifying. When I was drawing Misspent Youths back in 1991 I was trying to draw realistically. Really.

On this page I was purposely drawing the characters in a more cartoony fashion than usual.

The characters are, from left to right, up to down –

Buffy Crawfield – Buffy first appeared in the Moe and Detritus minicomics in ’89 or ’90, predating that other, more famous young woman with the same name.

Moe – Moe either has no last name, or many last names, depending on which version of Moe he’s being in my imagination.

Lili Veracruz – Lili is a terrorist. I got a fan letter back in the day suggesting that Lili was a fan boy fantasy. I’m not sure what the writer meant. Lili is a serial killer and not an especially nice one. She’s not one of “bad girls” that are often popular in comics who wear skimpy outfits and stand around looking provocative.

Cherice Unomuro – Cherice wasn’t intended to be a continuing character. She was part of a gag in the first issue. She seemed too lively to ignore so she ended up joining the (ever expanding) cast.

??? – This character only made an appearance in a couple of the Misspent Youths calendars I did for friends. (The art of which will show up here eventually.) I would need to hunt down a calendar to be reminded of her name and that’s too big a job to attempt at this hour.

Trouble Coyote – Trouble was inspired by my friend Schuyler, though, other than being thin and blonde, she neither looks or behaves much like Schuyler. Schuyler came to California to visit a couple of friends she’d met on the Peace March and she got adopted into my circle of friends. Trouble came to the City to go to college and got adopted into Moe and Detritus’s circle of friends.

K.Z. O’Neil – I got a fan letter from someone (not the same someone who wrote about Lili) who thought K.Z. was hot. I’m pretty sure I wrote back thanking him for the compliment. At least I hope I did. Given my drawing skills at the time I consider it a compliment to his imagination as well.