Las Vegas' Great Flood of 1999 - caught on paper!

` ...So, Dad had gotten us kicked out of Uncle James' house by being an idiot. What next? As far as I recall, we stayed with Aunt Judy - henceforth referred to as 'Aunt Sis' - and then with Jerry's bipolar mother.
` Possibly surprising fact: I didn't yet know that dad was manic depressive, though hearing that his mother was actually scared me. I was surprised to find that she was nicer to me than he was!

` For a while, I drew a lot of pointless things that happened to catch my attention.
` In one example, it is evident that I'd bought The Huge Book of Hell in order to try to disconnect myself from the extreme stress. (What was I thinking?) Hence, my drawing of either Akbar of Jeff.
` I think it's Akbar.
` And who are Akbar and Jeff? I suspect they may be two escapees from an interstellar clone army who eventually settled down into a hazardous relationship on the planet Hell, which is ruled by Matt Groening.
` But that's just my hypothesis.

` What else...? Well, we went to a lovely restaurant called 'The Rainforest', which has occasional 'thunderstorms', during which robot animals from various continents spring to life and maul people.
` Or not.
` Weirdly, the restaurant also had a mascot: A red-eyed tree frog named Cha Cha - who I'll get to in a minute....

` At Aunt Sis' house, there were also two Furbies, which she would get out when kids came over. (These kids thought they were real animals, too - and they were like, seven! Okay, that's sad.)
` She also had a gihugic cat named Monty and her policeman son had a Deutsch German Shepherd named Mac von Nostrum as well as a local German Shepherd named Lady.

` ...Predictably, when I had failed to draw Monty, Lady, and Mac, giving them up for cartoon characters instead, I did the only thing I could to rectify the situation: Create a visual distraction involving the Cha Cha Army sicced on Admiral Billy, Captain Furby, and Lieutenant Shark Dog.

` As I'm not too enthusiastic about showing you that bloodbath, here's another picture I drew during that time, in which I employed the 'Cha Cha Army' technique for no good reason.


` I guess Captain Furby had decided, "The hell with sides, Cha Cha's right! Some things were never meant to be!"
` And then attacked the air. They look like they're hallucinating....

` Another random thing I must have drawn before we were kicked out of James' house was the can of Pepsi Max that he had brought back with him from Mexico. On the same page, however, you'll notice that later on, I had been watching the news that day....


` Apparently, it had been raining in the mountains: Since deserts are not very good at soaking up water, a lot of it had come swooping straight into the valley!

` As evidenced by the opposing page, however, Aunt Sis' house was safely positioned on a hill, above the destruction of which Milo and Lady were oblivious.


` On the next page is a rendition of someone fleeing across the bridge as the waters - having destroyed the wash meant to channel them - ate away at the sediment underneath a trailer park.


` Erosion in action, indeed! The flood was so forceful that the trailers were immediately ripped apart when enough of the ground had collapsed beneath them, which you'll notice was happening to the one at the top.
` The other mobile homes were literally teetering on the brink of destruction.

` Meanwhile, Milo was napping on the chair, as was his wont....


` That there's the Charleston Underpass, which has a clearance of fourteen feet or so, blatantly demonstrating the height of the flood waters. In fact, there hadn't been a flood this severe since the early 1950's, after which a bunch of cars were found in a heap.
` Supposedly, no one had gotten killed except for one man who ought to have a Darwin Award to his name. He was apparently an impatient driver of an SUV. Sick of waiting in front of the rising flood, he drove his vehicle into it and was carried away into a debris-filled miasma.
` Way to go, sparky!

` I'll have more little sketches up later on - hopefully they'll be more interesting to look at.