Boy... some customers will do anything to get out of paying up! But this is actually a joke in very bad taste. Let me explain.

I had already announced that I would no longer be doing any more commissions. I meant it, too. However I can be an easy touch at times, and I've broken my vow of retirement more than once ... and usually regretted it for one reason or another. But the last commission I did as a favour to a fan backfired badly. To begin with, it was a quick freebie. No charge. But then the guy wanted the original drawing, and said he would pay well for it, and foot the cost of postage. Okay. I agreed. But then he delayed repeatedly before finally he promised to send a money order the next time he was in town. I crossed my fingers. A little more time went by with no money order, but unexpectedly he reported on FaceBook that he had had a heart attack! Oh, fudge, I thought, trying to be compassionate and not thinking about the money. I decided he would need plenty of time to recuperate, and send him email to take it easy for now. More time passed. And more. I was beginning to wonder about the situation, so looked up the guy's FaceBook page to see what he had been up to recently. I found that he hadn't posted in a while, but I found a lot mail left by his FaceBook friends, remarking that they would miss him! What? Oh Jiminy Cricket!!! He'd had another, or several new seizures and was a dead account. Literally.

I never met the guy and really didn't know him. I wasn't sure how to feel about the news. On the one hand, I'd gone out of my way to do him a favour, then at his insistence, agreed to mail him the original art in advance -- trusting him -- so now I'll never get the money I had earned for a job I never wanted to do, and the artwork itself is lost. The family presumably owns it ... at least until it discovers to its horror the sort of art the deceased collected, and burns it all.

I guess I have the consolation that I shone a small ray of sunshine into this fan's life before it was prematurely cut short. But as the gods are my witness, I'm never doing any commission artwork for any reason ever again!