"Pileup"

Last year in 2022 I posted essentially a landing page ("Forgot the Shovel") with backlinks to the previous eight years of calendars made from my work. So this then makes a solid decade with this particular client: Parks Highway Service & Towing. What a genuine pleasure to have developed out own little tradition - only another year to tie my previous record of longevity with Opera Fairbanks.

Another homage for this three-panel strip was a similarly designed (though the direction is reversed) spread called "Breakup" back in 2011. Both probably owe a little inspiration to the Game of Thrones HBO series epic episode of the "Battle of the Bastards" scene with the armies of Jon Snow and Ramsey Bolton fighting outside of Winterfell.

The inspiration for this was whelped in a drive-through line at a local coffee hut, which at 6am is typically only one or two other commuters. It has been observed that there are folks who can develop road rage simply sitting in one's car while not even moving. Maybe. that's. the. issue: not. moving. Anyways, what with all the concern over texting + driving that's still nowhere near as dangerous as doodling + drawing (please leave it to professionals).

It's also a rare piece in that the production was actually timed, as opposed to averaged out estimates of - depending on degree of complexity - two to three hours total tops. I had noted this triptych took: penciling in 2 hours, inking was an hour, another hour to scan + edit, one last hour to color digitally = five hours total.