Samsquatch

Background comps by Seonna Hong
After seeing these paintings, about the size of post-it notes, I am crazygonuts excited to see what Seonna has done with the rest of the layouts. Larry Leichliter has begun timing the X-sheets while I flesh out some of the more skeletal scenes exposed during the animatic phase. Mostly, by adding funny-looking drawings.

In 1882, near the village of Yale, British Columbia, the railroad crew of the British Columbia Express train from Lytton encountered and captured a creature, “something of the gorilla type”, that they called “Jacko”. Samsquatch was directly inspired by this encounter . . . or it would have been. Had I learned about it before I pitched the short and not during the behindhand research. It’s nice grist for rationalization, though. I mean . . . so what if, based on the description, Jacko was probably just a chimpanzee? So what if the whole event was likely journalistic fiction that has subsequently survived as bigfoot lore confabulation? It made a wide-eyed country dream of hairy little men by train tracks. More importantly, who would have thought that the name “Jacko” would have too many bizarre contemporary connotations to be a suitable name for a boy sasquatch?
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Line art clean-ups by Nicole Mitchell
As rendered in brush and India ink. She had the unenviable job of distilling good drawings from my very chicken scratch designs.