Through The Past, Dorkily

When I was a kid, I was so into comics, that I made my own. Most of them are pretty sad recreations of Spider-Man stories I'd read and, clearly, really enjoyed.

As one would expect, the art was crude and the story was primitive, limited and just plain...bad. It's interesting to see these efforts now (yes, I managed to save them all - are all comic book fans packrats?). Interesting and totally embarrasing at the same time.

However, I did have a more focused burst of creativity during high school in which I took one of the aforementioned "comics" from my past and inserted current (current = the 80s) events and current pop culture. It grew a life of its own from there, spawning multiple issues from me and even inspiring comics in the same vein which were written and drawn by my friends.

The result is, for me, laugh-out loud funny. The art is a bit better, but the writing, if I say so myself, is brilliant. The story is totally stream-of-consciousness, but it does, oddly, kind of flow. All the wonderful things about the 80s are there.

Rambo. Hulk Hogan and the Hulkamaniacs. Jacko (the Energizer guy). MTV and heavy metal.

I was on a roll. Well, perhaps. It's a very esoteric roll, but it's a roll.

After a while, it seemed only logical to start to insert the previously-referenced friends into the stories. And amazingly, I think the comics got better. I started to take on comic book conventions like panel layouts, standard writing methods and established speech patterns and cliches and motifs commonly found in comic books. And there was even a semblance of a plot.

Mostly, it was just reflections of a time. A slice of life, if you will. Maybe someday I'll post some scans and you can tell me it's utter crap, or if, heaven forbid, you'd want to see more. Of course, this would also mean that I think someone other than me is actually reading articles on this blog.

Anyway, I thought these comics were funny as hell. But maybe you had to be there.