Another page of stripped down cartooning. I was concentrating on doing simple character designs in order to animate them in Flash. Back in 1999 Nizzibet had been contacted by someone she knew who was working with an internet startup company. The company wanted to create a number of short flash cartoon series to be posted on the web. The plan was to generate a fanbase for each series inexpensively via the web and then sell/license the series to movie & television production companies. Nizzibet’s friend asked her (and therefore me and the rest of the Labor of Love studio) to pitch some series ideas to the company. The proposals didn’t have to come with illustrations attached – we weren’t going to be doing the animation – but I have a hard time writing for a visual medium without giving myself something visual to work with so I did sketches for each series as part of our idea generating process.

I don’t remember which (if any) series these sketches might have been for. It’s obviously one that I haven’t thought about in more than 8 years.

These sketches were done to see how simplified I could work. I have a tendency to add a lot of detail to my work. It seems more like a compulsion than a stylistic choice. I often have to decide ahead of time the limits of detail that I’ll put into a piece otherwise I can noodle it to death.

Second day of the new year and the first page from an old sketchbook. I’m pretty sure this book was finished in 1999. The lumpy thing at the bottom of the page is a sketch of one of Jeremy’s Germboys from the story Jeremy Loader Never Could Pick Up After Himself. I wrote the story back in 1992 or ’93 and it saw print in Asylum #3. Pia Guerra penciled it and I inked it.

In 1999 I was considering redoing the story with my own illustrations. Nothing wrong with Pia’s work (it was excellent), I just wanted to have a version of the story that was all me. I never got further than the sketching stage.