Aside from working a few hours in the morning for this personal comic, I've also been keeping busy by doing some freelance concept artwork for the excellent game company Tiny Mantis, as well as working a few days a week at the also excellent comic bookstore Forbidden Planet.

The interesting thing about retail is that it's a job that most people do not seek out as their primary occupation. What this means is that almost everyone who works a job at retail also has something else going on in their lives.

Because of this it's almost impossible to know what kind of lives the people working with you live outside of the store situation, and equally frustrating is that there's usually very little time during work to find out.

So it's been a (slow) pleasure to get to know those people better and find out a bit more about what they do in their own time, as opposed to the time during which they collect a paycheck.

Surprisingly, it turns out that most of the people that work at Forbidden Planet are artists of one kind or another(!)

This is awesome because during the last few months I've gotten to know more new talented artists through the ACA and forbidden planet than I did during the year and a half following graduation, and it only dawned on me recently how much that effects the way you approach the creation of your own work, and with how much energy.


Annd, page 4.