“Oh no! It’s the blinking question mark!”

If you’ve never seen this you’re a lucky Mac user. The blinking question mark was a sign that your hard drive and your operating system weren’t talking to each other. These days that problem is indicated by what we call the rainbow ball of doom. Either way it’s time for this kid to call tech support.

The boy calls his mother. She’s unresponsive.

Our boy is really starting to worry now.

Once it became apparent that having me draw an eight page comic was going to take longer than he wanted to wait the boss started thinking of ways that we could repurpose some of the ideas in the story. Our primary means of marketing in 2002 was postcards. Every month or two we would send out a postcard to clients and potential clients. It was a pretty effective way of keeping us in people’s minds. I got quite few calls that started with “I’ve had one of your postcards sitting on my desk for years …”

Anyway. Our client base broke down into three main categories – one or two person home studios, independent creative studios and the creative departments of large corporations. The boss asked me to come up with three strip ideas (one for each of our client categories) that could be used on postcards. This is the first panel of our home studio strip – a young boy comes home to find the house dark and foreboding.