From the first Forty Winks sketchbook, 1996.

I had to post a Pandora sketch today because it's Pandora's Birthday, November 3rd (1996). Set the way-back machine to Sunday, October 28, 1996...

I got a call from my friend Cesar Castillo who was working on a comic project to come visit - he introduced me to the writer of the project Vincent Sneed. I showed him my sketchbook, he asked me to do a pin-up of the character he and Cesar were working on. One week later I gave him the finished pin-up.

This particular Sunday Vince had just got back from a one-day comic show in Dover, Delaware. He asked me if I wanted to do a comic project with him, and presented me with 3 possible scenarios. As usual, I said I would like to do them all. Then he showed me a two paragraph story treatment he had just typed out not minutes before, about a cute-as-a-button girl who was a eye-patch wearing, battle scarred action hero hunting and being hunted by a ten-eyed monster in her dreams. This would over the next few weeks/months/years become Forty Winks, the little girl was Pandora Spocks.

She is 13 years old today.

Today's sketchbook post is the very first concept drawings of Pandora drawn that day or possibly a day or two later... back then she was light-haired in reality and dark-haired in the Dreamscape - and very different in style compared to how she's drawn these days...

She has appeared in 12 issues of Forty Winks, many anthologies and mini-comics, a current running webcomic right here at Webcomicsnation, and another full-length graphic novel coming out in 2010, tentatively.

Happy Birthday, Pandora.

-gg