Old Drawing - 1983

Tired of looking at picture-less SOE Layoff post.  Let's brighten the mood a bit with this cheery little drawing:  Going through my stuff and found this from thirty years ago, around when I first moved to San Diego.  Didn't do it for any reason in particular.  Obsessed with skulls and little pen-and-ink hatching lines at the time.  The more little lines and dots, the better.

Layoffs at SOE

Big layoffs at SOE today.  I'm not sure how many got let go, but I was called into a meeting room with about fifty other people, the execs, the human resources person and financial person.  They told us we were being let go.  There were more people being let go in customer service and in the Austin office, so quite a few people.  We are all officially employed for two more months but we were asked to clean out our desks today.  October 28 is my official termination date.

It was too bad to see all those people losing their jobs.  I'm sure a lot of them were living paycheck to paycheck.  As for me, I'm more fortunate than most, and I'm going to be treating this as a "sabbatical" from the industry.  It's a chance to re-tool my career and try a few new things.  For starters, I'm going to be spending more time writing and drawing you-know-what.

I've seen this coming for a couple of years, as some of the company's biggest projects have not been as profitable as they hoped.  But SOE gave us a very generous package and I have absolutely no hard feelings towards the company or any of the execs.

Hi. TAG ...

The push for Candy Popper!! worked. I did raise a little more money from GoFundMe, but even better the post mentioned our manufacturer and they got contacted by an industry group about the project (because it, and RetroActiv Games were unknown entities to them). Once contacted, our manufacturing partner got all in a tizzy and wanted the GoFundMe page taken down (which I did). Simultaneously, however, they jump started the process with us and have ordered a second set of hardware from Ingram Micro so they have a system to use in building the cabinet and housing the peripherals, etc. RetroActiv is getting a hardware of our own so Dave Dentt can test the game on a native system.

So, thanks for your well wishes. It seems we may be off and running on Candy Popper!! ...

The Art of the Luba Peoples (Congo)

L.A. County Museum has a great show going right now: African art from the Luba tribe, who live in Congo. Blair studied a lot of African art--and remembers most of it. Having her along added hugely. Great stuff.

Find Ronnie

Vine of Unity user group meet

A color comp I did up

Its rough but I figured I flesh it out more

Cleaning house/eBay advice

I'm going to get rid of a lot of dead weight and downsize my not-vast-but-not-small book and trade journal collection. While I'd love to get some of my money back on things like "Cinefex" and my collection of movie-related art books, I don't really expect a whole lot of cash-per-item. Mainly, I need to just clear out the junk and if I can turn some coin, all the better. Ellis suggested I post about it to get the perspective of Jim and anyone else who's done some eBay business. What's the best way to go about this, what are some of the pitfalls and how much work is it to liquidate collections of mostly-sentimental-valued stuff?

More PB Shenanigans!

Could this be... more comic art?!