Totem Paul

It can get a bit noisy when Paul tries to order at the fast food counter.

Paul's a vector illustration, drawn all in InDesign.

Originally I had a greenish yellow background, but at the last minute I changed it to blue and liked the monochrome look a lot better. I thought I'd throw in the original yellow one just for fun.

Here's the original sketch of Paul.

The Third Doctor

I'm a big fan of Doctor Who, so I thought I'd start a series of vector drawings of the eleven (!) different Doctors (so far).

Jon Pertwee played the Doctor from 1970 to 1974. His episodes were the first to be broadcast in color. The Master, the Doctor's evil Time Lord nemesis, made his first appearance in a Pertwee episode.

Pertwee was also the first to wear more than one outfit. The previous Doctors always wore pretty much the same thing, but the Third Doctor was quite a clothes horse. He favored tuxedos, opera capes, frilly shirts and velvet blazers (in some pretty eye-searing 1970s colors). I drew him in the outfit I liked best.

Pertwee's Doctor was a bit more active than the previous two. He wasn't afraid to defend himself or even attack a foe, and was schooled in the art of Venusian Aikido.

The Third Doctor relied more on gadgets than the others. He drove a Whomobile (a hovercraft that looked like a typical flying car) for a time, and later a vintage roadster he nicknamed "Bessie."

The Third Doctor was put on trial by his fellow Time Lords and exiled to Earth. This helped the ever-frugal BBC to save money on the show's budget, by not having to build a new alien planet set each week.

He's also known for the catchphrase, "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow," but what's odd is that it wasn't uttered nearly as much as people think. According to some sources, he only said it on air twice! I'm not sure how that line became so identified with him.

The Third Doctor was also the first to team up with his previous incarnations (in an episode called "The Three Doctors"), something the show's done several times over the years. When faced with a threat he couldn't handle alone, the Third Doctor used the Tardis to go back in time and pick up his previous two incarnations to help him out. A cool idea, and a fun way to see the previous Doctors in action again.

Doctor #3 is a vector drawing, drawn all in InDesign. I'm having a lot of fun working in this simpler vector style.

Please forgive the ugly watermark on the illustration. I swore I would never add one to my art, because I know that 99.99% of my readers would never even think of stealing it. But earlier this year I had a run-in with an art thief who was not only stealing my work, but selling it as her own! Hence the watermarks. This is why we can't have nice things.

Stay tuned for Doctors #4 through #11!

Here's the first sketch I did of Doctor #3. I drew this from memory. Yikes! Let this be a lesson to you, kids, don't be afraid to use reference photos!

Here's sketch #2, drawn from reference photos. Jon Pertwee had a distinctive-looking mouth (well, he did), so getting that just right was key to drawing a good likeness of him.

Dog Of The Dead?

Take a look at today's Marmaduke comic. Apparently the artist has grown bored with drawing Marmaduke and his wacky canine shenanigans, and is changing the tone of the strip to that of zombie survival horror.

By the way, Brad Anderson, artist and writer of Marmaduke, has been drawing it since 1954. That's 56 years, folks. Is it any wonder he's starting to lose his mind here?

The Second Doctor

I'm a big fan of Doctor Who, so I thought I'd start a series of vector drawings of the eleven (!) different Doctors (so far).

I've seen a few clips of Patrick Troughton's Doctor, but I have to admit I've never seen an entire episode of his. The Second Doctor was a bit more mischievous than the stern and serious First one.

So how did we end up with a Second Doctor? William Hartnell, the First Doctor, decided to leave the series after three seasons due to poor health. The BBC was faced with a dilemma-- cancel a popular show, or try and recast the main character and hope people would accept the new actor. An absolute genius at the network came up with a brilliant solution: the Doctor was a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, and when Time Lords are injured or reach the end of their lives, they regenerate into a new form. So William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton, and the rest is history.

This regeneration idea has allowed the show to stay on the air far longer than it ever could have with one star, and it keeps the series fresh as well. I can't think of any other series in TV history that's had a whopping ELEVEN actors play the title character!

Back when Doctor Who first premiered in 1963, no one at the BBC could have possibly predicted that home video would some day become a reality, or that anyone would ever want to watch the episodes fifty years later. The BBC would record an episode on videotape, broadcast it, then record the next week's show over it! Many of the First and Second Doctor's shows are lost forever in the mists of time. It makes me ill just thinking about it! Meanwhile, every episode of Two And A Half Men and The Bachelor will exist well after we're all dead and buried. There's no justice in this universe.

Doctor #2 is a vector drawing, drawn all in InDesign. Well, except for the background, that was done in Photoshop. I'm having a lot of fun working in this simpler vector style. It's interesting seeing how much I can simplify a character and still have them be recognizable.

By the way, that's a flute he's holding. The Second Doctor would often play the flute to help him think.

One weird thing I've noticed: when I do a bitmap drawing, I use the graphic tablet. I wouldn't be caught dead without it. But when I do a vector drawing, I use the mouse. Strange. Further proof that there's more than one person living in my head.

Please forgive the ugly watermark on the illustration. I swore I would never add one to my art, because I know that 99.99% of my readers would never even think of stealing it. But earlier this year I had a run-in with an art thief who was not only stealing my work, but selling it as her own! Hence the watermarks. This is why we can't have nice things.

Stay tuned for Doctors #3 through #11!

Here's the digital sketch of the Second Doctor.

The First Doctor

I'm a big fan of Doctor Who, so I thought I'd start a series of vector drawings of the eleven (!) different Doctors (so far).

I've seen short clips of William Hartnell's Doctor, but I have to admit I've never seen an entire episode of his. Hartnell gave us the first ever Dalek episode, and introduced the Cybermen as well.

Although the Hartnell episodes set the stage for the series, they hadn't quite figured out everything back then. A lot of things in the early shows have been ignored or forgotten for continuity's sake. For example, in one early adventure the First Doctor says that he invented the Tardis, but we now know he did no such thing (he actually stole it from a repair shop!). They didn't even decide he was a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey until one of the Second Doctor's adventures.

And then there's the whole Susan thing. She was his first companion and called him "Grandfather," and was apparently from Gallifrey as well. But was the Doctor really her grandfather, or was that just an affectionate term she used? They were pretty vague on details like that back in the day.

Back when Doctor Who first premiered in 1963, no one at the BBC could have possibly predicted that home video would some day become a reality, or that anyone would ever want to watch the episodes fifty years later. The BBC would record one of Hartnell's episodes on videotape, broadcast it, then record the next week's show over it! Many of Hartnell's three season's worth of shows are lost forever in the mists of time. It makes me ill just thinking about it! Meanwhile, every episode of Two And A Half Men and The Bachelor will exist well after we're all dead and buried. There's no justice in this universe.

Doctor #1 is a vector drawing, drawn all in InDesign. I'm having a lot of fun working in this simpler vector style. It's interesting seeing how much I can simplify a character and still have them be recognizable.

One weird thing I've noticed: when I do a bitmap drawing, I use the graphic tablet. I wouldn't be caught dead without it. But when I do a vector drawing, I use the mouse. Strange. Further proof that there's more than one person living in my head.

Please forgive the ugly watermark on the illustration. I swore I would never add one to my art, because I know that 99.99% of my readers would never even think of stealing it. But earlier this year I had a run-in with an art thief who was not only stealing my work, but selling it as her own! Hence the watermarks. This is why we can't have nice things.

Stay tuned for Doctors #2 through #11!

Here's the original digital sketch of the Doc.

Frankenstein 009: Vectorstein

Wow, it's been a whopping 8 months since I added anything to my 100 Frankensteins Project! Time to remedy that situation, pronto!

Here's a quick little vector drawing of Frank, spouting a lovely sentiment from the end of The Bride Of Frankenstein.

Drawn entirely in InDesign. The text was hand lettered. I thought it would be interesting to limit myself to only two colors.



Believe it or not, Frank started out as this ridiculously rough sketch.

Famous Monsters Convention 2010

A couple of weeks ago I went to the first annual Famous Monsters Convention in Indianapolis. Apparently the old Famous Monsters magazine is making a comeback, and the publishers sponsored this show.

I went with my nephews Kyle and Aaron, and non-nephew KW Monster (not picture: me). This was Aaron's first ever geek convention. I was so proud (Sniff! Sob!).

Kyle had been to a horror con once before, but fortunately this time he didn't get sick and vomit in my car.

We saw this while standing in line. Don't jump, Kong! Peter Jackson's remake wasn't that bad!

It's Sammy Terry, famous Indiana TV horror host. I drew an illustration of Sammy and wrote a piece on him here. This is actually a statue of Sammy, as he wasn't there in person. He's getting up there in years, and I'm assuming the convention grind is too much for him these days.

His son was there though, and he's spearheading an effort to have Sammy inducted into the Indiana State Museum!

Kyle got to meet Rupert Boneham of Survivor fame. OK, I'm not quite sure why Rupert was at a horror convention, but whatever. Rupert has a charity called Rupert's Kids that helps troubled teens, so I'll give him a pass. He also lives in Indy, so maybe that's why he was there.

Kyle got an autographed photo, book and his picture taken with Rupert.

Yes, Kyle's wearing a Dr. McCoy t-shirt.

Dr. Tongue (from Day of the Dead) and the American Werewolf in London browsed the convention as well.

There were a lot of horror celebrities in attendance, including the casts of Return of the Living Dead (minus James Karen though, darn it), Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, the Lost Boys, and Halloween. Ernie Hudson, the 4th Ghostbuster, was there as well. And Paris Themmen, who you know better as Mike Teevee from the original Willy Wonka movie.

Aaron was most impressed by a group of guys dressed as Ghostbusters, complete with proton packs and ghost traps. He wanted to know where one went to buy a proton pack. I tried to explain that you don't buy them anywhere, you have to make one yourself, but I don't think he believed me.

I was happy to find a rare and out of print art book that I'd been looking for forever, and for a reasonable price. We sat down to rest for a while, then headed for the car. As I got to the car I realized I'd left the sack with my book in it back in the convention. I ran back inside, and amazingly the sack was still leaning against the wall where I'd stupidly left it. I guess horror fans are an honest lot. Soon I'll be forgetting to wear pants when I got out.

As we left the show, we saw Death walking through the parking lot. I'd seen Death before at another horror show earlier this year. We asked if he needed a ride and he said he was good. He bid us farewell, told us to drive carefully, and said he'd see us soon.

See you next year, Famous Monsters Horror Convention!

Goldthinger

Here's a quick vector drawing I did of a gold monster. Originally I had a more elaborate background planned, but the more detailed I made it, the more it detracted from the monster, so I said forget it.

Drawn all in InDesign.

At first I drew this normally colored background, but I found that making a monochromatic landscape made the monster pop more. I'm including this version for posterity.


And just for the heck of it, here's the monster with no distracting background at all.



Here's the original sketch. Nothing much changed in the final drawing, other than adding a more expressive eye.

Storyboards #1

From 1997 to 2001 I worked at a small animation and web design company. I helped work on 3D computer animation (you know, like Toy Story, but not nearly as impressive), and 2D Flash animation. It was a fun place to work. Too bad the company's no longer around (that's a story for another day).

One day around 2000, a local bread company came in and asked us to come up with some concepts for a series of computer animated commercials. They wanted to show everyone know how healthy their bread was, and wanted to promote nutrition to kids and yadda yadda.

It was my job to come up with some concepts for several commercials and draw storyboards for them. Since I've been a comic book geek, er, fan all my life, of course I came up with a superhero theme.

Anyway, here are the storyboards for the first commercial in the series. Keep in mind that I drew these 10 years ago (I like to think I've improved since then), and that story boards are supposed to be rough.

In the vastness of space we see a large object approach the camera. As it gets closer we can see that it's made entirely of unwholesome junk food.

We follow the junk food asteroid and see it heading on a collision course with... Earth!

Panic-stricken citizens point and shout at the sight of the asteroid growing larger in the sky.

Why do people in movies always point at giant asteroids or 100 mile-wide spaceships? Are they afraid people can't see the moon-sized object hanging overhead?

Meanwhile, at the Fortress of Nutrition, the home of the Food Force...

Note that since this spot was for a bread company, the Fortress resembles a loaf of bread. Well, maybe half of one.

This of course was my homage to the Hall of Justice on the Super Friends cartoon. I can almost hear Ted Knight narrating.

The Snack Alert sounds!

I have to assume that the Snack Alert tells the Food Force that... someone's eating an unhealthy snack, I guess? Someone's eating too many snacks? Sometimes it's hard to tell what 2000 Bob was thinking.

The Food Force gathers in the War Room to hear the announcement.

I don't think I got far enough into the project to name any of these characters, or even think about whether they should have names. Because these commercials were for a bread company, the slice of bread is the star of the spot.

The Mayor appears on the viewscreen and tells the Food Force of the impending disaster: the junk food asteroid will strike the Earth in minutes, wiping out all healthy foods and turning Earth into a junk food wasteland unless they can stop it.

Wait, didn't that happen for real? I think it did. This is why DisneyWorld had to dig a deeper trench in the It's A Small World ride so that the boats wouldn't run aground from the weight of American passengers, and why hospitals are buying wider, reinforced beds.

If you look very closely you might be able to see a faint outline of a top hat on the Mayor. Apparently I decided that the Mayoral sash was cliche enough and erased it.

Captain Whitebread (I just made that up) shouts, "Food Force! It's up to us to save the Earth!"

It's hard to tell here, but the lady hero with the tiara there on the left is supposed to be an egg. Eggs are healthy, right? 

The Food Force takes to the skies! Hopefully there's a skylight in the Fortress!

They rendezvous with the asteroid in space, as it zooms ever closer to Earth.

The Food Force attacks the high-fat, sugar laden asteroid, but to no avail. It continues on its deadly course.

Note that the potato character has several sets of masked eyes. Com-o-dee!

Captain Whitebread says, "Our only hope of stopping it is to join together and form... The Food Pyramid!"

Obviously I did these storyboards before the government changed the food pyramid. It used to be easy to understand-- eat more of the stuff on the wide bottom and less of the stuff on the pointy top. Now they changed it all around and it's got vertical stripes and even stairs on one side (no lie!). I have no idea how to read it or what I'm supposed to eat anymore.

I'm a bit puzzled as to what the character on the right is supposed to be. A waffle? They don't seem particularly healthy. A Triscuit? I honestly don't remember what I had in mind there.

The Food Force joins hands and forms the outdated, old school Food Pyramid. As soon as they're in position, crackling energy forms around them.

We now see a stalk of broccoli came along for the ride, and I think that's a whole grain muffin on top of the pyramid. Or maybe it's a cupcake, who knows? They're definitely one of my food groups.

They fire a powerful beam of nutritional energy (whatever that is) at the artery-clogged heart of the asteroid. For a moment it continues its relentless course unabated.

Gradually it crawls to a stop, then begins reversing its course, unable to withstand the mighty power of the Food Force's nutritional energy.

The asteroid is knocked clean into the sun, where its instantly vaporized, and hopefully doesn't do any damage to our precious, life-giving star. Earth is saved!

The Food Force returns to Earth, surrounded by a cheering populace.

Captain Whitebread tells the crowd that eating foods from the Food Pyramid will give them the power to hurl their own metaphorical asteroids into the sun, or some such moral.

Looking back at these storyboards, they're incredibly ambitious and way beyond the scope of our little Mom & Pop studio. Remember, these were going to be 3D computer animated, not Saturday morning cel animation. It would have taken our small staff at least 3 years (and cost the client a million dollars) to pump out something like this.

It also seems a tad long for a commercial. I doubt if I would have been able to squeeze all this into just thirty seconds. 

The bread company came in for another meeting to look over the storyboards. They said they were impressed and liked what they saw, but that they'd decided to just rerun their current commercial for another year (meaning they saw our estimate for the ads and fainted dead away).

This happened a lot at our studio, and is the main reason it no longer exists. We were too small for Hollywood, but too big for Evansville. Local businesses would come to us, wanting us to produce slick looking animated commercials, but they'd have a whopping $500 in their ad budget. We'd burn through that in less than a day.

Even if we simplified the concept or switched to 2D cel animation, it would still have cost them $10,000, minimum. No local business had that kind of moolah to spend on one ad.

Ah well, se la vie!

Angry Electric Antelope

He's furious. He's fully charged. And he's an even-toed ruminant. This summer, New Globe Pictures presents The Angry Electric Antelope.

He started out as a deer with complicated multiple point antlers, but I didn't much like them so I changed them to simple, non branching horns. Since deer don't look like that and antelope do, he got a species change as well.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.

Here's the original sketch. I actually drew this version for real (except for the antlers) and then scrapped it because I just didn't think it was working. Something about his muscly little body bugged me.

So I did this second sketch onscreen (sans antlers). I liked this version a lot better, and ended up going with it.

I'm also on Twitter for some reason.

Color Blind

Something I've always wondered... why is the Yellow Trucking logo orange?

More Compact Disc Art From The Bronze Age

Back in 1994 I worked as a graphic designer at a compact disc company, designing CD art. In 1993 we entered a series of CDs, starring my Screenman character, in a National Screen Printing Expo, and our company's superior screen printing work won a coveted Golden Squeegee Award. Yes, that's a real thing. Go read about all that and see the CDs I designed here.

Flush with our success, we decided to enter the contest again the following year. It was decided that since we'd had such luck with the previous Screenman story, that we'd do a sequel.

Unfortunately I got a little carried away. The first series was simple and concise, so of course I felt the need to try and top it. Like all sequels, my follow-up adventure was bigger and bloated, but not necessarily better. That's how I see it now, anyway. At the time I thought I'd achieved greatness.

Anyway, on with the Further Adventures of Screenman!

Here we're reintroduced to Screenman. For some reason, in the original story he was Screen Man, but in this one he's Screenman. Who needs consistency? Since we last saw him, he's gained a sweet ride called the Screenmobile, and a Robin-like sidekick named Squeegee (because every name in this story has something to do with the screen printing process).

The two heroes are patrolling the streets of Screentown, which has some interesting architecture. Take a look at that impressive skyline, won't you? Somehow it contains the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, the Twin Towers (yikes!), the Hancock Building, the Daily Planet (!), the Space Needle and the Gateway Arch. Maybe Screentown is like Vegas, and those are all scale replicas?

Also it's hard to see here, but there's crosshatching all over the Screenmobile, implying that it's constructed of a metal frame with silk stretched across it, like the silk screens we used to print. Not very safe in an accident.

I like the way that Screenman seems oblivious to the fact that Squeegee is an ungrateful little punk.

A little about the process used here. For the first Screenman series, I drew the art and colored it using the traditional four color comic book method of cutting amberlith sheets. You can read about that in the previous post as well.

This time I was more ambitious. Photoshop was still relatively new back in 1994, and I got the bright idea that I would scan in my artwork and color it on the computer. With the amberith method, you were limited to 20 or so colors. With Photoshop, the color possibilities would be endless.

I'd used Photoshop to color artwork before, but never on this scale. It took me weeks. I'm not kidding, literally weeks to color it all. Partly because I was learning as I went along, but also because in 1994, Photoshop didn't yet have layers (!) How I managed to do anything without layers, I have no idea. It also only had ONE undo back then. And I was coloring with the mouse-- I didn't have a graphic tablet. It's amazing I was able to do anything at all.

Coloring the characters went fairly quickly; it was the detailed, painterly backgrounds and special effects that ate up the time.

Today, comic books are all routinely colored this way, with Photoshop or similar programs. Back in 1994, it was a radically new idea. I'm not saying I invented computer colored comics, but I was definitely there on the front lines.

Because this wasn't actual paying work, the company wouldn't allow me to work on Screenman during normal hours. I had to come in and work overtime on it. And the only time we had a free computer was at night. So I would come in at 6 pm and work on it until midnight, or sometimes even 6 am. Nothing like staring bleary-eyed into a computer monitor for 12 solid hours. Oy.

Today I could knock out a project like this in a day or two, but of course I've got nearly 20 years of experience under my belt (20 years! Oy vey iz mir!). Plus Photoshop has layers and a lot of other features it didn't have back in 1994. Still, I wish I could contact 1994 Bob and give him some advice on how to speed up the process a bit (along with some lottery numbers).

Looking back, I see that I was trying to cram way too much detail into these tiny panels. There's way too much dialog as well. Hey, we learn from our mistakes.

It looks like I was trying to model the yellow-shirted screen maker guy after someone, but after all this time I have no idea who it might have been.

I wish I would have come up with a better catchphrase for Screenman than "Great Scot!" Geez, Superman said that one all the time. I could have at least had him say, "Suffering Screens!" or something like that.

I like that Screenman is consistently referred to as "The Living Embodiment of Good Screenmaking." It makes him seem more pompous (which is the effect I was going for) and actually becomes important later.

Note that Squeegee is playing the part of audience surrogate, pointing out flaws in the story.

Here we come to the meat of the story. This was the 1990s, so of course Screenman had to meet his evil counterpart. Nineties comics were full of dark versions of heroes, with slicked-back hair and ponytails. I guess Steven Seagal was still a big influence back then.

Note that Dark Screenman's costume has the same colors as Screenman's, but... darker. That's how you know he's evil. No good guy would wear burgundy. Also note that you never see the end of Dark Screenman's ponytail. This was a little shout-out to Todd McFarlane's Spawn comic, which featured a character with a ridiculously long red cape that always trailed out of the panel.

Degreaser Girl is my favorite new character. She doesn't really do anything in this story other than be captured and spout Yiddish words, but I like her anyway. I never got around to showing her in action, but she has the power to shoot streams of bubbles out of her hands. You're probably wondering about her name-- silk screens have to be washed with degreaser in order to clean off the oil and grime on them before they can be used.

Wow, there's way too much dialog on this disc! Believe it or not, there was even more to start with. I remember cutting the dialog to the bone, but it's still ultra wordy.

Whenever a character gets punched in the face, he has to say, "Oofda!" It's the law.

Note that Dark Screenman's word balloons have wavy and jagged borders. That's so you know his voice sounds EVIL!

I kind of wish I'd have laid out panel three differently. It looks like Screenman's getting blasted in the anal region. The dialog doesn't help matters either.

I like this disc, despite the overdone dialog in panel 1. Whenever I drew a crowd scene in the 1990s, I could never resist the urge to add little in jokes. If you look closely you'll see Beavis and Butthead in attendance. Ask your parents who they were, kids.

Hey, Squeegee finally makes an appearance to remind everyone he exists. Looking back, I see one of the flaws in my story-- four main characters, but only two of them actually do anything. That's my writing tip for the day: If you can't think of something for a character to say or do, then they shouldn't be in the story.

I like Dark Screenman's death scene in panel 3. You have no idea how difficult it was for the 1994 version of me to pull that off.

Nobody ever gets Dark Screenman's line in panel 3. He says he needs to go lie down in a dark room, which is what I have to do when I get one of my migraines. But everyone who's ever read this thinks he's saying "darkroom," like in a photography studio.

I like the color scheme of this last disc. If you look closely, each disc has a separate overall color tone. The first disc is primarily purple, the second yellow, the third orange and so on. I planned it that way so that when the discs were mounted side by side they didn't all look the same. They get redder as you go along too, because red equals danger.

In panel 2, once again it looks like I was modeling the screen makers after someone, but again I have no idea who it might have been.

Squeegee, ungrateful punk that he is, makes a PG-13 pun about underpants in the last panel.

Note the giant green monster in the background in the final panel. That's an emulsion monster. We coated our screens with a light-sensitive emulsion and exposed them in a camera. The emulsion was thick, gooey and green. Yep, I was setting things up for another sequel. More on that in a minute.

So, how'd our discs do in the big contest this time? Well, not as good as the year before. This time our entry didn't win anything, not even a bronze squeegee.

So what went wrong? I think the main problem was the Photoshop coloring. If you look at the original Screenman discs, the ones I colored with amberlith, the colors are all simple, bold and bright. There were very few halftones used as well. On the new Screenman discs, the colors are all dark, muddy and full of halftones. Back then I didn't understand how to properly color and output artwork on the computer. The dots per inch seem a little low as well. Everything looks fuzzy, instead of bright and sharp like on the first discs. I should have printed out the film at a higher resolution. As I said before, we learn from our mistakes.

My supervisor also told me in confidence that the plant was really busy at the time, and rushed through the print job, so that the quality wasn't as high in the previous year. Whether that was true or not, I can't say.

Now, about that monster in the last panel and setting up the possibility of yet another sequel. It was around this time that DC Comics published their Death of Superman storyline. The mainstream media went crazy over the fact that DC had the nerve to kill off Superman, apparently not knowing that characters die and are subsequently resurrected on practically a monthly basis in comics.

My plan was to do a Death of Screenman story for our next Screenprint Expo entry. As I remember it, the Emulsion Monster attacked Screentown, and Screenman was killed defending the city. What followed was a convoluted and badly written trip to the afterlife as Screenman met both God and the Devil before being sent back to Earth. It's probably just as well that story never happened! We didn't enter the screen printing contest the next year, and I left the company shortly afterward, so it wasn't to be.