Well friends, it’s been 26 freaky weeks since we set sail on this here good ship Alphabeasts and today we finally dock at the letter Z. I knew from Ahuizotl what beastie I’d be doing at this final moment, a creature I’d first seen late at night on a pre-cable television broadcasting 20 year-old shows into my 12 year-old brains. This guy here then is a Zanti Misfit as featured in the December 30, 1963 episode of The Outer Limits called, appropriately, “The Zanti Misfits.” I was something like negative 11 years-old when the episode first broadcast but had the good fortune to grow up watching WJZY (channel 46) on the regular in the days before my folks were willing to pay for television and I caught a rebroadcast somewhere in the latter days of the 1980′s. I’ll try not get on too big of a tangent but I look on those pre-cable days very fondly. There were only a handful of channels but they were chock full of old Tarzan, Godzilla, Lone Ranger, Kung Fu and cheesy horror pictures. WJZY showed old Star Treks, Twilight Zones and Outer Limits from about the time my parents would go to bed until midnight or so when the channel would go off the air to a Jimmy Durante clip. (“…and good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are…”) Anyhow, I regularly stayed up nights during the summer to watch these old shows. I loved the Outer Limits best of all because it was almost always freaky. I don’t have distinct memories of all the stuff I watched but I can recall very clearly the night I saw The Zanti Misfits. It’s one of those stories where the twist ending is a moral along the lines of “the human race: what a buncha assholes.” Those misfits really got me and that episode remains one of my favorites to this very day. Um…I should also say that I augmented this illustration with a nod to a fascination from high school regarding a whole other set of Misfits.

Pals, I have SO ENJOYED doing these Alphabeasts drawings week to week for the last half a year. The incredible art produced by the contributors to this project has been outrageously beautiful from the very first day. I’m proud to stand with this very talented and dedicated crew. The biggest of ups has to go to project organizer Andrew Neal who dedicated himself tirelessly to collecting the entries from all over the dang place and arranging them onto the site with handy dandy tools to search by letter and artists and so forth. It was a lot of work and he proved himself super capable of conquering the challenges week after week. Andrew runs one of the best comic book shops in the State of North Carolina (and I know ’cause I live in North Carolina) so, if you are ever in Chapel Hill,  do your eyeballs a giant favor and stop in at Chapel Hill Comics to experience the wild sensations of comics shop excellence. I should, I know, link to all my great friends from the project but time is short at present so here’s some virtual fist bumps to fine folks like Isaac Cates, Sam Wolk, Lupi McGinty and AZ, Ben Towle, Leah Palmer Preiss, Rich Barrett, E.C. Steiner, Christian Sager, Caitlin Lehman, Brandon Padgett, Tom Davidson and the probably dozen more friendships that have been made or firmed up over the Alphabeasts Project. It’s been a wild ride, friends, now let’s all catch some Zzzzzzz’s.