While in the middle of writing all these convention experiences down, we took our trip to the Orlando Mega-Con. Naturally we had to hit Disney World while out here, and being in this atmosphere for some reason got me reminiscing about my youth.
My original plan with this diary was to limit it to convention experiences, but what the hell. Here’s a little childhood history. I’m finding I’ll have lots to talk about besides just the conventions. There are all the emails I’ve sent to artists, phone calls I’ve made to and gotten from artists. There’s just generally my experiences self-publishing. There’s the whole creation of the art process. Why limit myself? Here are my experiences with comics from my childhood.
WHEN THE CAREER WAS A GLINT IN MY EYE…
My Mom says what an amazing artist I was from a very young age. Kids around me were drawing round circle heads, MAYBE with eyes, and hands sticking right out of the head, and I was drawing Superman flying through the air, with his cape flapping in the wind. I used to love drawing Star Wars. I drew Kiss. And I drew Marvel superheroes, because I had a Marvel activity book with all the characters in it. I could spend hours staring at all those pictures. Who were all these interesting characters? The pages were black-and-white…What color were they?
I also had a DC Justice League Treasury Edition that fascinated and confused me. For example, why were there two Supermans, Batmans, and completely different-looking Flashes and Green Lanterns?
When I was in (I’m guessing) first or second grade, for some reason all the kids were drawing a stick-figure style Star Wars rip-off that we all called “Hats in Space,” the name of which I assume was partly stolen, in attempts at humor, from the Muppet’s “Pigs in Space.” I don’t know who started this whole phenomenon, but naturally it stemmed from our intense love of Star Wars, and we all got into it. The idea was to draw different kinds of hats flying through space, shooting at each other with laser guns and blowing each other up. They were easy to draw, but fun to imagine. I remember kids were getting sick and staying home with chicken pox, and we’d draw “Hats in Space” get-well cards. Then I got sick with chicken pox, and while I was home, I received “Hats in Space” get-well cards.
So the first comic I can remember drawing, that my mom actually kept all this time, was my fleshing out of the rich “Hats in Space” mythos. Early on with this project, I exhibited one of my continual bad artistic habits; I got into it maybe a dozen pages, and never finished.
At this age, my parents enrolled me in a cartooning summer school course, which I really enjoyed. I think that’s probably where I learned to do flip cartoons. My dad would give me his old business cards, and I’d draw on the backs of them. For hours, I’d hold a previous card up to the sliding glass door, tracing onto a new card, from one image to the next, moving the picture slightly. Then repeating the process for the next card. After a stack of twenty cards or whatever, you grab the side and flip them, making a “movie.” I’ve managed to keep all these. Most of the early ones are Star Wars or Shogun Warrior rip-offs. The later ones are all rip-offs of Frank Miller Daredevil-type fight sequences.
The next comics “project” I can remember was also in elementary school. This was a combination of Disney’s Condor Man film, The Pink Panther (films, not cartoons), and the Disney (Goofy) Super-Goof comics that the local shoe store gave away when I bought a new pair of shoes. It was the whole reason to buy shoes, to get excited about shoes. My character was Superstooge, a bumbling hero who fought the silliest villains I could come up with, including a fat rifle wielder who fell down every time he shot off his guns, Dandruff Man, a cat burglar, a knife thrower, and…well shoot, that’s all I can remember, and none of them are that funny, now that I think about it. I probably did at least twenty or maybe forty pages, and one day I just tossed it in the garbage. What in the hell was I thinking? That was my history that I threw out. To this day I regret it. I kick myself.
Later, I wrote a sequel to Superstooge, with a bunch more characters, including Arnold Schwartzenegar in his briefs and a cape. And I did maybe another twenty or forty pages, and then I threw that out too. ARGHH!
It’s because I’ve thrown out so many things like that that I’ve become such a hoarder now. I’m afraid to get rid of anything anymore.
I did keep the “movie poster” I’d made for the story, though, (because of course I imagined this story was so good it would become a blockbuster) as well as a flip cartoon of the movie’s film credits. I even wrote a theme song on the piano, and other songs for the different characters. All instrumental.
It wasn’t until sixth grade that I actually started reading and collecting comics. But in sixth grade I got into it with a vengeance.
Since my mom was encouraging of my drawing, when we went to the airport or supermarket, she’d see me looking at the comics, and ask if I wanted one. I usually said no. But in sixth grade I said yes to Daredevil #207, and I loved it so much, the next trip to the supermarket, she picked up another Daredevil, a Thor, and a Captain America. And that was that.
Soon I came up with a superhero comic of my own, and actually wrote and drew about five issues worth (a hundred plus pages!). It was called “Shockwave,” about a superhero from another planet who could shock people.
In my typical fashion, after five issues, I looked at them all, and rather than continue on, I decided I could redraw and rewrite them better. I redid the first issue, and then never touched the project again.
I did another maybe five pages of a Frank Miller-style ninja character.
Later, I also attempted to redo my Superstooge character, which my mom finally pointed out I’d been spelling wrong all this time, but either I thought it was funnier, or I was too lazy to fix it, so I left it. Super Stuge.
And the last comic I remember doing before college was a James Bond-type of French spy, which stemmed very directly from a spy roll-playing game that had just come out, and was itself a rip-off of James Bond movies. I started a story and maybe got ten pages in, then abandoned it. But later, in high school, for an English project, I wrote and completed maybe a ten page story that I was very proud of. If nothing else, because I was able to complete it on a deadline.
Into high school, my comics drawing petered out, and I pursued more serious “literature.” Namely, I spent hours writing a Dungeons and Dragons Sword and Sorcery “Lord of the Rings” rip-off fantasy book. I wrote about 250 pages of this awful thing before it petered out. I was probably about halfway into the story I planned to tell. I tried to pick it up again in college, and even majorly reworked it as I went, but by then I kind of realized it maybe wasn’t so good, and kind of moved on to other things.
What I want to point out here is that all my projects as a kid were just rip-offs of comics or movies or books that I enjoyed. Because you have to start somewhere and learn and grow. If you look at my published work, you’ll see how far I’ve come. Now I’ve got a rip-off of the X-Files, a rip-off of Jack Kirby-style monster stories, a rip-off of DC Comics’ Dr. 13, and a rip-off of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. And just wait until you see all the rip-offs I’ve got in the works next! So you see, with hard work and persistence, I’ve managed to hone the rip-off skills I’ve been developing since my artistic beginnings!
I think all my projects had such high aspirations that I just lacked the time or commitment to ever finish them. I remember in college hearing that Leonardo da Vinci rarely finished his projects. It was like, for him, just finalizing the visualization of the project was enough. That’s why his sketches are so fascinating, often more so than his paintings to the critics. It’s like he lost interest once he completed the visualization stage. That was his art. That’s what drove him. I could relate to not feeling driven to complete things. Does that make me a modern-day da Vinci? Not if you’ve seen my art.
It wasn’t until I graduated from college that I began thinking of comics as a profession again. But of course the first project I came up with, Limbo Cafe, was so huge and overwhelming, I abandoned it, unfinished. After that, I was afraid of jumping into something again, and not finishing it. That’s why, reading Dave Sim’s “How to Publish Comics” spoke to me. He advised to keep working. To push through and actually finish. To know that your first hundred pages won’t be that good, but instead of fixing each one, just move on to the next one and try to make it better. And once you do a hundred or so pages, you should start to get more comfortable. You’ll start to get in a rhythm.
Because that puts you far, far above all the clowns below, who only get one page done, and work on it for years and years, and keep showing that same page to the same editors, year after year. Sam Kieth told me the exact same thing. Starting out, that’s what he had done, getting hung up on one page. Finally the editors told him, isn’t this the same page you showed me last year? That was the kick that made him realize he better move on. But I’m getting way ahead of myself. All this is another story for later…