I'm thinkin' this is Season 4 Episode 10 of WWE Storytime? This was originally made for Lowbrow studios in 2019. Directed by Mike Parker, supervised by Julia Slaughter.

This was the first of the WWE Storytime animatics I ever did for Lowbrow, and I love it the most. I actually wasn't raised around wrestling or the WWE, so I remember calling up my best friend from high school. He was, and still is to some extent, so I was like "I'm working on this thing. Do you know about the APA?" and he lit up and went off "AWWW DUDE, THEY'RE SO COOL!" and hyped me the hell up to work on this, and I think a lot of his second-hand excitement for the project bled into this, and I made sure I did Ron Simmons and JBL justice.

To this day, I still don't watch a lot of wrestling, but because of this animatic, I keep an eye out for 'em.

This was also a super challenging time in my life when I was working on this. I was still at the Cyanide & Happiness studio and I was starting sobriety. I remember I was in a headspace like "Enough is enough, I'm going cold turkey, not a drop anymore." And it was October 2019, so there were holiday / Halloween parties afoot at Explosm. I had gained a reputation as a tank- I could put beer and liquor away like nobody's business, so they were making announcements (innocently, I was being quiet about my sobriety) "Hey, if anyone wants to help empty out this keg, come and get it!" And gritted my teeth. Free alcohol within walking distance, and it had been so normalized in my weekly routine (especially Fridays) that it was really difficult to deprogram.

Then I get started on this WWE thing at home, and it's ENTIRELY about drinking and having a blast while drinking and I'm just like Goddammit... it was the hardest month ever, and as I'm drawing these guys with their bigass beer mugs I'm just thinking the whole time "Sure looks like fun." ...Then it was my birthday in November, family drinks at Thanksgiving. Then it was Christmas with family. Then it was New Years Eve, while all kinds of shit was going down. Then COVID happened.

Somehow I stuck with it. If I could conquer my chemical dependency to alcohol, it's bolstered my belief that I'm stronger than a lot of things. According to my EasyQuit Drinking app, I'm at 3 years 7 months 12 days as I type this.

This animatic holds a really special place in my heart for a lot of reasons. It's my first contract animation job OUTSIDE of Cyanide & Happiness, first time working with Lowbrow, it was a really fun story and I got to do a lot of fun things in it.

Not sure how much of it made it into the final cut. Like the Ginyu Force homage, or the "Satan Squad" logo (which I slipped in as a reference to the God musical episode of Season 3, The Cyanide & Happiness Show). But I think this one was a huge reminder to tone it down on some of the details, because they might not make it into the final product anyway and it's a big waste of time. A lesson that was repeatedly learned throughout my time with C&H, a cartoon with stick-figures, but I digress. I have a passion for details and background gags.