This is part of the portfolio drawings from 1988. The scruffy fellow is August Thyme. No deep meaning behind the name. I liked the sound of it. I rarely name characters with any deeper intent. I choose names because I like how they sound when I say them. There’s a personal music in them.

August is a villain. I say is because he’s still wandering around the corridors of my imagination. He collects people’s souls in that little medical bag of his.

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We finally had our IRS audit this morning. Probably have to pay some taxes on things we thought we were allowed to write off but apparently we can only write off if we were making money. The auditor was a nice guy. Not at all the power-mad psychopath that we assume all IRS auditors are.

Old drawing here. The signature says 1988. Pre-figure drawing classes. I believe this one was part of a series of portfolio drawings I did in order to get work in small press fiction magazines. The only story I can associate with this drawing is that I’m pretty sure the monster was inspired by a critter from Niven and Barnes’ Dream Park.

I did two different storyboard projects while at Labor of Love. I don’t think that this was part of either project. I think I was just doing a storyboard panel.

It’s a chair. And a cup. Sometimes it’s a good idea to draw what’s in front of you. The actual chair didn’t have the hearts on it.

Fall of 1998 – Labor of Love was using a turtle as its mascot during the publishing years. This is the version I drew for the relaunch of GLYPH as a free tabloid.

More character sketches for Zazkwatch. The sprite in the left corner is one of the Legion of Sarahs.

More sasquatch sketches, this time of other sasquatches than my protagonist. The fellow at the top left appears in the first episod of Zazkwatch for the GLYPH tabloid.

Second sketch. One of the characters in the story had a glass eye.

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Sorted more boxes last night. Nothing really surprising got discovered. The boxes were mostly books and videos. Hopefully Saturday I should hit the paperwork boxes. Then Sunday we can sort and figure out what we’ll still need for the IRS. The appointment is on the 9th.

Once I got tired of emptying/re-arranging boxes I did a minor update to the Oz Squad history page. Now there are links to all the issues that Steve has posted at his website. If you’ve never read Oz Squad (or haven’t read every issue), here’s your chance.

Probably from the fall of ’98 – I contributed an illustration to Anodyne, a free culture magazine published out of Portland. I’m going to have to dig through my back issues to find the final illustration. It was for a fiction piece.

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My back has finally back in good enough shape for me to start hefting boxes around again. We’re missing some paperwork and receipts that are needed for our IRS audit next week and I’m pretty sure that said paperwork is stuffed in a box in our storeroom. So far I’ve determined where the papers are not. I’ll have another go at it tonight.

One bonus is that I found my Keenspace (now Comics Genesis) email printout with the passwords I needed to update the Sentient 39 site. So I’ve added entries for Glinda and Trot. These have been sitting on my computer since last year sometime. Glad to set them free at last.

Summer of ’98 – Sasquatch headshots. I don’t think I decided to call the strip Zazkwatch until shortly before I drew the first episode. If I were to do the strip now I’d call it Skook. Shorter and punchier. Plus, many readers didn’t seem to realize that the character was a bigfoot. Just because I read everything I could get my hands on about sasquatch as a kid doesn’t mean most of the rest of the world had heard of the creature. Even here in the Pacific Northwest.