The Urbz: Central Station 4-Page Comics (Electronic Arts,2004)

In 2004 Sarah and I were hired to do a 4-page comic for a then-new Sims game called The Urbz (along with Pete Bagge, Jay Stephens, Chynna Clugston-Flores, Jim Mahfood, James Kochalka and other creators). The Urbz was some kind of grittier Sims add-on, or something, I never played any version of the game and Electronic Arts didn't send comps out or anything like that so it's not something I have any connection to beyond the freelance gig.

I chose to do the "Central Station" location as the characters were all punks, goths and weirdos and that was up my alley. I basically did a PG-rated Hectic Planet-meets-Archie kind of thing, with the level design and main characters standing in for HPs locations and cast. I had fun working on it and I think it's some of my cleanest, most solid art, with a great color job by Sarah. It paid well and I wanted to put a lot into it and include as much business and plot as possible in the short space. That's kind of my specialty, other than talking dairy products hitting people. Cramming information in.

There was a dedicated Urbz website for some years but it's been taken down. Sarah's got the finished art somewhere on a computer (maybe on the dreaded broken hard drive of mystery and despair) but some folks have captured the images. I've linked to two sites and tossed some jpegs here that may or may not read cleanly. I scanned the original art for the line art jpegs above (The art's for sale, btw, if anyone's interested. It's been gathering dust on my art sale list for some years at what I think is a bargain price. I really like these pages, but no one cares much about the characters. They're listed under "Misc Art/Illustration on the original art list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WlJgIu3mGvE6Rny14ow_i-h4lRY9jp0rvXSqgz1dC8o ).

This was one of two paying online/website art jobs I ever got. The other was a 4-page comic for TCM Underground (a prequel to the movie 2000 Maniacs, reprinted in the Dork hardcover collection from DHC). Both gigs were people who knew our stuff giving us the call, otherwise I didn't know how to pursue online illustration. Plus I was busy doing traditional comics like a traditional dinosaur.

Here's links with more information and (probably) better images of the color pages:

- https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Urbz_Comix#Central_Station

- https://www.simsnetwork.com/simpedia/console-games/the-urbz/artworks/urbz-comics-central-station