Well, you have to start somewhere... I was spending a lot of late nights hanging out in local coffee shops with friends; doing hundreds of comic jams called “Meanwhile...” and passively working on a crudely drawn comic called Eclectic Cafe.

    Eclectic Cafe was something I did on the fly with no real plan or direction. It revolved around my “Mr. Coffee Man” character and loose versions of me and my friends.

    I drew around 14 pages before I shelved the comic and moved to Ottawa with my girlfriend Carol. Soon after arriving in Ottawa I managed to land a job in TV animation as a background artist. I forgot about doing comics for a while thinking I had found my dream job.

    These first few pages I consider the earliest genesis of what would evolve into Chiaroscuro. Mr. Coffee Man lives on as the enigmatic mascot of Meanwhile Studios.

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    Forgive the crudeness. These are very much in the tone of the Meanwhile... comic jams, scratchy-hatchy and very unplanned. I think there’s faint text scribbled in pencil where you see caption boxes, but they didn’t come through on the scan.

    I very seriously thought about opening a coffee shop / art gallery a few years ago but fate worked against my plans. Probably for the best. The character drawing at the table is name Chris, that would be my cartoon alter ego. My middle name is Christopher, real imaginative of me, no?

    The Coffee Man sketch is something I actually made into a “stain glass” picture using translucent vinyl on a piece of clear plexi glass. It’s hanging in out kitchen right now.

    I’ll not torture you with the rest but move along to version 2 to compare it against.