MS Paint Memories

I'm currently in the process of cleaning my apartment, and while I was doing so I found some old flash drives. Since I tend to use them once then lose them in drawers or backpacks or high-speed pursuits, these cute little pieces of technology tend to be time capsules for whatever catastrophic computer meltdown I was having at the time.

So I found the one I was using just as my old tablet PC was dying back in 08, and included on it are these little gems (click it to enlarge or check it out here); artwork I did with my tablet and MS Paint, because owning a tablet PC should never stop you from killing your own ambition with miserly ineptitude.

This one is delightfully psychotic; a meme from DeviantART that encouraged you to use ten original characters to fill out the scenarios they provide. Now, did I have ten original characters? Only in a very broad definition of the word "character". And "original".

1) Dan, the janitor. Briefly a character for a comic I was working on based on my own experiences as a summer janitor.

2) The Mimeclops: A chainsmoking creature meant to be a parody of Pablo Picasso's habit of inserting himself into paintings as a mime, back from when I confused allusions with wit.  As a character he was meant to be part of a surrealist comic somewhere between Evan Dahm's Rice Boy and the works of George Herriman.

3) Forgot who this guy is. Looks like a tough guy, though.

4) Julius, scrapyard mechanic. The star of my first-ever comic book, he has a big wrench and he likes to break machines into their constituent pieces. God, that original comic was horrible, you can see where I cracked under the deadline.

5) Augustine, Julius' female counterpart. She had a bit part in the original comic but there was an expanded universe where she was important. Yes, there were originally going to be twelve characters, each named for a month and each representative of a district in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It was like the Hunger Games, only without the strong premise or thousands of pages of actually finished writing.

6) The Brass Man. My shameless knockoff of black mages and yukes from Final Fantasy. I resurrect these guys from time to time.

7) James (or... some other name, who can remember): Dan's roommate and best friend. Loosely based on a buddy of mine from high school.

8) Um, the Library God. His masks are an ibis and a cat, representing the two sides of intelligence: knowledge and curiosity. Or something. I think there might have been a Cat in the Hat reference in there? And Alice in Wonderland. I liked the idea of a character who had absolute control over a realm of books

9) The Skeleton. I'm sure he had a name at one point, but I can't remember it. Way back when The Story wasn't even The Story yet, The Skeleton was a character. I had no idea what the story was about, but I knew for sure that I wanted him to be able to move through fresh dirt to access secret places. I tend to have ideas upside-down.

10) The Anubian. I drew these guys a lot back in college, under the influence of Akira Toriyama's character art in Blue Dragon . Weird, naked dog-headed monsters; villainous monster. As I got further from pure fantasy as a genre I lost interest in drawing him. In retrospect, these guys are a lot like Tolkien's orcs. Apparently biological but not really, they exist purely to serve some sort of evil power.

  A drawing of the Kark and Celie from the mesozoic era. I don't know what they're wearing. I think it's pajamas with a leather belt on him and some sort of aquafresh labcoat on her.

Chromeon: a metallic evolution of Eevee I designed with a friend while we were hanging out at the game store back home. Look at those sweet highlights and reflections! Undertones? Reflections? I don't even know what those are.