As I remember it, the client had some sort of show down in Southern California. As part of the art she would play different characters besides the friendly pharmacist. I don’t remember if we were shown any photos from the actual show. I know that we definitely didn’t see any footage of her in action. If we had I would have had a better sense of how to portray her. In person she was very buttoned down. She didn’t come across as someone who enjoyed performing or being creative or spending time with kids. Not that she disliked any of that, necessarily, it just took some imagination to see her being imaginative.

Did I mention that I did a lot of sketches of this woman?

At some point we asked the client what she thought of the caricaturing I was doing of her. She was mostly noncommital. Except. She thought her cartoon self wasn’t smiling enough. Didn’t look friendly enough.

Hmmm.

I wanted to point out that if she wanted her cartoon to smile it would help if she gave me a real life example to follow. Oh well.

Barely awake at the moment. Is this the client? Yup. It’s the client.

There’s quite a few more sketches of this woman to come. More than I usually do of a subject at one time. Nizzibet, the client and the client’s package developer were doing most of the talking. So I just sketched.

Is a kids club sponsored by the pharmacy department of a major supermarket chain a bad idea? Probably. Lord knows I think that even bad ideas have a place. This idea just seems like a joke. There’s just too much opportunity for corruption and marketing. Should we have taken the job? Maybe if we’d been willing to do the work, take a check and get out. The client had her own ideas and really only wanted someone to execute them, maybe providing a glamor to what she was already planning. We did get paid for the work we did. It was one of our largest paychecks for, really, some of the least amount of work. I can’t complain about that.

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.