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.

More Zazkwatch sketches from 1998.

A sasquatch/human size comparison sketch from the spring/summer of 1998.

Here’s what I learned about surviving the zombie apocalypse based on my recent watching of the 2005 Dawn of the Dead –

Fast zombies are no more dangerous than slow zombies. You just need to start shooting them sooner. (This is not to imply that zombies are not dangerous. They are.)

Beyond that survival seems to depend on what sort of person you are –

Number 1 – Don’t be an asshole. Even if you reform and act selflessly you’re still toast.

Number 2 – Don’t be gay.

Number 3 – Don’t have wild, out of wedlock sex.

Number 4 – Don’t be a woman in a non-traditional career (like driving a truck).

Number 5 – Don’t be an immigrant involved in a bi-racial relationship.

Number 6 – Don’t be a non-white man involved with a white woman.

Number 7 – Don’t be a devoted family man, even if you are a white guy. (Surprised me too!)

Number 8 – Don’t be a guy who can’t keep his commitments (gets divorced/doesn’t have a steady job).

Number 9 – Don’t be a long-haired guy.

Number 10 – Don’t be fat.

Number 11 – Don’t be a redneck – even a friendly harmless sort.

To survive the zombie apocalypse (according to Dawn of the Dead 2005) you want to be female – a young widow or orphan, a young white male (non-asshole variety) or a black male who has dedicated his life to maintaining the status quo. If you are said black male you can be a bit of an asshole as long as you never express any sexual desires.

You have been warned.

When I first ran across this sketch (and the others to follow in the next few days) I thought it was for a story I’d been developing for the Big Bigfoot Book. That would have meant it was done around the time of the San Diego Comic Con of ’95. Rick Klaw had talked about a book of sasquatch comics that he was putting together. I don’t remember if he asked me to contribute or not but his project inspired a story idea. Like many of my story ideas, Sasquatch in the City, remains just an idea.

But this isn’t one of those sketches. I found those recently while going through some of my other sketchbooks. This is from the time in 1998 when Labor of Love was getting ready to do GLYPH as a free monthly newsprint tabloid. I wanted to do something with a Northwest flavor. I also wanted to do something short and self contained. Trying to do sixteen pages of Bonecage Graffiti in each issue of the magazine version of Glyph had been a frustrating experience.

So I took the sasquatch character I’d created for the Big Bigfoot Book and started inventing short four page stories for him. The 16 panel grid up in the corner shows me starting to think about how to best use the larger pages that the free GLYPH was going to be printed on. I’ll eventually be posting the Zazkwatch stories over at the Skook comics site. (After I find my copies of Misspent Youths #1 so I can finish posting that story. It’s embarrassing how much unfinished stuff I’ve got out there.)

Presumably spring/summer of ’98. It’s a screaming thing. Do I really need to explain a screaming thing? The guy in the upper right is probably the Raven. Though by 1998 he was no longer the Raven, or the Mongoose or any of the other names he’d had.

In the lower right is (I think) Kip Manley.

From spring or summer of ’98 – I suspected that this illustration was inspired by reading Darker Than Night by Owl Goingback. It’s one of a surprising virile sub-genre of horror fiction – the White identified Native American fighting an ancient evil that the Native Americans once put down and the White folks have stirred up again.

Checking Darker Than Night‘s publication date (1999) I see that apparently something else inspired these kachina sketches. Can’t remember what. I’ve always liked kachinas though.

From (probably) spring of ’98, an unfinished contrast sketch of a big muscled dude and an old bent dude.

Another sketch from (probably) spring of ’98. This sketch as done with blue pencil and inked with a couple of sharpies. Many professional comic book artists do their penciling with non-photo blue pencils. It apparently saves the inker from having to erase the original pencils after he/she has inked them. I wanted to see if I could save time working in this method. The blue pencils are too hard for me to read and so made inking more chancy than I like.

On a different note, I hereby recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I was reading it on the bus this morning and missed my stop because I was so involved. This happened even while I was sitting next to a gentlemen who positively reeked of cigarettes. Normally the smell of cigarette smoke doesn’t affect me much but his smell was practically solid and I was looking forward to getting off the bus. And still the book sucked me in.

I’ve mentioned before that I sketch more than I write. It finally occurred to me yesterday that I’ve got a big stack of sketchbooks that I could use for filling up the empty spaces when I can’t get anything written. Which is most to the time these days.

The first thing I realized while looking through my sketchbooks is that I really don’t know when most of the content was created. I can guess approximate dates based on the subject matter. So after almost forty years I’m going to start dating my sketches as I do them. Not that this helps with anything that’s likely to get posted here.

Today’s sketch was probably done in the spring of 1998 while Nizzibet and I were putting together the first incarnation of Glyph. This was the magazine version. I had sixteen pages of Bonecage Graffiti, my follow up to Misspent Youths, in each issue. This sketch is of Moe, one of the many protagonists, at different ages and states of fashion.