Nothing to say about this one. The calendar had to have a cover didn’t it?

When Luvset and I were kids (ten and eleven or maybe eleven and twelve) we guest dj’ed on a friend’s radio show. The show was broadcast by Sonoma State University in Cotati. I don’t remember now how many times we were on – two, three times at the most. The friend dj’ed under the name Johnny Petrol. My bro and I went by the names Jack Lightning and Davey Thunder. It was a lot of fun. Somewhere in the world there might still be a tape or two of the broadcasts.

Years later, when I was getting ambitious about minicomics I asked Luvset to write a series and we revived Lightning, Thunder and our version of Johnny Petrol. And no, we didn’t ask our friend if we could use the character. We were self absorbed, punk kids. Permission is so polite.

Petrol is the guy in shades holding things up. Lightning is the guy with the vest. Thunder is the geek with the hat. I’ve never let anyone call me Davey. I hate the nickname. But for this character it just seemed appropriate.

Merriam is an itinerant jeweler in a Tolkien/Robert Howard inspired world. She travels from town to town with her kids. When in the wildernesses between civilization she looks for the treasures of older, fallen cultures. Sometimes getting these treasures means fighting off their guardian monsters and demons.

If I had a choice of DC superheroes to use in a series Ragman would be at the top of a fairly short list. I think Ragman looks cool. I didn’t think either version of the actual character (during the time I was reading comics anyway) were particularly compelling. The creepy patchwork costume character idea is wonderful. This is an early version (not meant to be Ragman – I think he’s some sort of sorceror-highwayman) but I’m sure many more will show up in later sketches.

Nizzibet’s latest essay is up at Tuppenceworth.

Here we have the Woman with No Name. She wanders a post-apocalyptic landscape rightin’ wrongs and taking care of folks who need killin’. This series concept was inspired by Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns with flavor added from the Mad Max movie trilogy (among other end of the world influences). I’ve never named the main character. She’s tall and androgynous and ruthless in her pursuit of justice for the weak and wronged. The series was to be called Scarecrow. Cause that sounded good. She’s still wandering around my imagination and makes an occasional appearance in later sketchbooks.

From the 1989 calendar –

Here we have Lady Heather Ann Shatter and the Demon, Boralis. At one time I had a whole series of adventures imagined for the two of them. Lady Shatter was an ex-secret agent. Boralis was a demon who’d been stuck on the terrestrial plane for the last five centuries. They’ve continued to appear in my sketchbooks over the years, changing professions and histories but maintaining their basic personalities – Heather basically sweet but capable of great violence, Boralis pragmatic and ruthless with an amused affection for human beings.

My earliest drawing are of dinosaurs. I was drawing dinosaurs and other prehistoric creature long before I got around to drawing human beings. So obviously I had to include some dinosaurs in the 1989 calendar. At the time this was drawn the idea that dinosaurs might be warm-blooded active creatures (rather than sluggish swamp dwellers who dragged their tails) was still new and controversial.

This is probably my first drawing of Cthulhu. It’s possible that I’d sketched him/it before but I’d have to scour my sketchbooks to find an example. I don’t remember being a huge Lovecraft fan in 1988. I’m sure I’d read Lovecraft but I’m probably a bigger fan now than I was then. His work was harder to find and therefore harder to be influenced by. Among writers, Clive Barker was probably my biggest influence at this time.

From my 1989 calendar –

In 5th grade (ten years old in 1974) I earned extra credit for my creative writing. Much of it was the sort of stuff that would probably get me sent to a counselor these days. I’d kill off the kids that picked on me in hideous ways. Usually they were eaten by extra dimensional monsters that had somehow been dropped into our reality. I also wrote more innocuous fare – stories in which I was visited by the Switagern, a creature that only appeared on an orange full moon. It was a sort of a griffin but made from the combination of a tiger and a swan rather than a lion and an eagle.