Gallery Update, Undeserved Presents, and Randomness

I now have one…two…THREE Vinland Saga collections! Hahaha!

What can I say? My wife’s good. She either loves me or she’s trying to bribe me to do something (like finish the master bathroom…). Or both. Totally undeserved and unexpected, but yay nonetheless.

Anywho, I spent yesterday working on a “shout out” to be included in my middle son’s yearbook. He’s a fourth grader, which means he’ll be graduating and moving on to the middle school (where have the years gone?). Parents of fourth graders get to include a custom message in the printing of the yearbook. It’s usually just some text and clip art, but given this is me we’re talking about, I had to create something special and unique. I did the same two years ago for my oldest and produced this:

This is what PMD looked like just 2 years ago.

Because the school only provides the generic form for parents to fill out text and choose clip art, I had to open this file up to remember what size image to create this time around. I was a bit taken aback by it, Plunger Monkey looks so different! I know when I started drawing him so many years ago he had a very pronounced under-bite/lower jaw, but it was shocking to go back and see it. Pretty neat to see the way he has evolved over the years, and interesting that it happened so gradually that I didn’t notice (not unlike observing the aging process in ourselves or our kids, we tend to not see the changes unless we are visually reminded). I might put together a post in the near future detailing how he’s grown, digging through my old sketch books and photos of envelop art that I’ve drawn him on. This is also (I’m pretty sure) the first appearance of The Multi Purpose Novelty Squid, who hasn’t changed too much in the last two years.

So anyway, here’s the image from yesterday. I’m going to try something a little different with this post by setting an image as a “featured image”, which is how I make the gallery posts. Not sure what will happen when I do it with a blog post, so you may see the following image twice:

I think I’m happier with this version of PMD, he’s got more life and personality.

In case you’re wondering, my middles son’s name is Odin, after the Norse father of the gods (his most famous son being Thor, in terms of pop culture). In the mythology, he was all seeing, but traded one of his eyes to become all knowing, and is usually depicted with an eye patch. He also had a pair of ravens, Huginn and Muninn, which I believe means thought and memory, who would fly all over the world and bring information back to him. He also had an eight legged horse named Sleipnir and a spear named Gungnir, but I didn’t work those into this composition.

There you have it, a little PMD to brighten your day! Oh, in case you run into him, don’t tell Odin about this, it’s a surprise for when he gets his yearbook.