Early Jenny Sketches Unearthed!

Here are some very early sketches of Jenny Woodlore, protagonist of Border Worlds, from the sketchbooks of Kika Kane, made in the wee hours of some long-lost San Diego Comicon night in 1985! Denis Kitchen took me to this gathering of underground cognoscenti at the Hotel San Diego, a charmingly seedy once-grand hotel which later served as a setting for parts of the seedy 2000 film Traffic (Miguel Ferrer is held in custody there but meets his end when his room service is poisoned). These soirées included the like of Don Donahue, R.L. Crabb, the late and beloved Dori Seda, S. Clay Wilson, Dan O'Neill, Spain Rodriguez, Jim Valentino, Larry Marder, Gary Groth, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Trina  Robbins, and a host of other figures on the cusp between the underground and alternative generation of comics creators.

Over the subsequent dozen or so years, I attended several of Kate's (as I knew her then) salon des bandes desinées, always lagging behind due to the 3-hour time difference between the midwest and California, and usually exhausted from days of conventioneering. Inhibited introvert that I was, I also generally had more than trace amounts of alcohol, tobacco, and THC in my bloodstream, indulgences that almost only took place by hanging out with the wrong kind of people! These factors contributed (but by no means excused) the fact that over the years I polluted Kate/Kika's sketchbook with every manner of sordid Anton Drek sketch, all in some kind of misguided neurotic effort to outdo the "bad boys," most of which I cannot show here without going "adults only."

One of the problems I had in drawing Megaton Man and especially in the transition to Border Worlds was in approaching realistically-proportioned characters, something I only began to solve as the eighties came to a close. Here that struggle is on display, at about the time I was beginning work on the first Border Worlds back-up feature for Megaton Man #6 (October 1985).

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The sketch below is from 1989, and already shows an interest in greater similitude (the sketch of Nicole Panter from memory being a case in point). Trying to be all "stream of consciousness" like R. Crumb! (The blatantly erotic elements should give you some idea of the raunchy tenor of the other sketches I did in Kate's three sketchbooks.)

My thanks to Kika Kane for allowing me to snap photos of these forgotten images at her home in Marin County in June 2014! Below is probably the most accomplished of my sketches, from 1991.