When I moved out to the country, even though I have lots more space now, I’ve concentrated on cutting way back on my stuff, and have gotten rid of sooooo much.

I’d make multiple copies of the comics pages for advance review, and then I’d always have 5 or 10 extra sets. That sure adds up over 40 or 50 books! I have some of these sets going back to the 1980’s.

On the plus side, I saved many copies of projects in various stages of completion. Am quite surprised to see so much of that in here. Back in the day, the only way you could get a book to a publisher in progress was to make a photocopy and send a fax. It looks like I saved all of that stuff.

In the couple of cases where people have falsely claimed to have created my work, boy would they be surprised what I have on record. I never throw anything away. Of course, none of these claims ever went anywhere, but I’d just kill them with my archives, seriously.

I also saved all of the bluelines from A DISTANT SOIL. While I sold a bunch some years back, there’s a big pile in here. Man, do they stink!

Very sorry to hear about your father, Stewart! That must be rough.

On organizing… in my family I was always the organized one. I wasn’t always neat, but I did keep things sorted. My father… wow, he would put stuff wherever it suited him in that moment then be surprised he couldn’t find stuff five minutes later! 🙂 I always picked on him because he only had a couple of folders on his computer… everything (and I mean everything) was on the desktop… so anyway, I’ve been watching you talk about your sorting because I have several boxes of my father’s artwork to go through some day. I hope I found it all after he passed away, because there was a lot of it and much of it I hadn’t seen since I was a kid! My ultimate plan is to organize everything like you’ve talked about and also make high-resolution scans of everything. In cleaning out his house after his passing, I too found several completely ruined pieces that you couldn’t even tell what they were… that made me sad since they were irreplaceable. Fortunately I have a bunch of stuff, though. I’m both looking forward to the organization and dreading some of the memories they will bring up.

I’m trying to sift through stuff that I don’t know why I keep stored. Papers I wrote in high school and college are just clogging up space and enough paper is very, very heavy! Would not want to move a lot of this stuff when the time comes I move again.

The important thing is the art and original manuscripts. I actually found a manuscript with the character’s original names on it. Liana was Jenny.