Around the time when I was in high school and high school adjacent, I was reading a lot more comics than I read now. Back then, though, comics were having a new Golden Age. Comics were a big deal, because I guess some people decided to hell with the Comics Code Authority, and they were gonna do whatever they wanted. I mean, Todd McFarlane was a damn millionaire, all on account of Spawn. I grew up in a really small town - an eight-mile island - but you could get your mainstream comics at the newsstand section of Wal-Mart or Publix. Marvel, DC, Image. I bought a lot of X-Men and Gen13. Specialty comics we had to drive to the comic book store for. My favorites were Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Strangers in Paradise. (They're both good.) For some reason, I manage to forget that Johnny the Homicidal Maniac was so influential to me. I reckon it's because I came upon it in high school (I used to get my anatomy and physiology teacher to call me Nny - my then-boyfriend and I would call each other Nny as well), and high school was not a good or fun time for me, and it is full of people and things I would rather forget (such as the aforementioned ex). I seriously only keep up with two people I went to high school with. I used to make a little comic called The Adventures of Mary that was my little copy of JTHM. It was about a homicidal child. Mainly I enjoyed doing the ink-splatter of blowing someone's face off. (Sam Kieth said he inked the Maxx's claws by dropping ink and blowing on it with a straw. I always tried this and found it very difficult. Maybe I should've been tilting the paper at an angle.) I would go and photocopy it at the drug store and sell them for 10¢ each. (Copies were 5¢ back then. I wish copies were 5¢ now...) I don't remember much about The Adventures of Mary, except someone was always getting horribly murdered by this small child. I think she had a friend, and the friend had footie pajamas. Or maybe Mary sometimes had footie pajamas. The most extensive comic of this I did was set to "O Fortuna", and I think I rolled the comic into my typewriter and typed the lyrics under the panels. Since I read a lot of comics as a teen, I also read a lot of Wizard magazine. I loved Wizard magazine. They had a section called "Pen Pals" that ran at the bottom of the letter column, and you could write in with your name and address and your three favorite comic books and someone would write you if you had interests in common. I know two of mine were JTHM and Strangers in Paradise, but I'm not sure what the third one was. Man, I was swimming in letters. I got at least a letter a day, sometimes more, for a month after that was published. I'd say that 85% of them were from prisoners. No joke. Not sure if it was because I was a) a woman, b) over 18, c) said I liked JTHM, or some combination of the three. I think I only had one woman write me, and the rest were men. Man, I had some pen pals! One of them would write me typed letters on a computer, with that old printer paper that you had to spool into the printer by the perforated holes on the side! I think all of his letters rhymed, too. I think I used to try to make mine rhyme back. I had another pen pal who would always draw some pencil drawing of a babe next to his letter. My pen pal Kim typed all her letters on one of those typewriters that typed in italics. She would send me Tori Amos tapes and photos. We became pretty good friends for a while, and we wound up going to see Tori Amos together on her Scarlet's Walk tour. I think I had two pen pals that I maintained from death row. One of them was like, "I killed someone, and I have learned my lesson, and here I am trying to be a good person." He was interesting to write to. Another pen pal I had that was on death row was someone I had actually heard of from a radio show I listened to, so he was like a mini-celebrity to me. He insisted that he did not commit murder, and sent me a photo of him and his young son. He wrote the WILD letters, yo. I wish I still had one so I could take a photo of it. He would start at one corner of the page, and kind of write in a triangle, and then kind of turn the paper and start in another direction, so you weren't really sure where to start reading the next section. Then he would finger paint over the whole thing. So I'd have this four-directioned diagonal letter in his erratic handwriting, and there would be a finger paint wash over the whole letter that just said "JIGGLY PUFF", or whatever the phrase of the moment was (Pokémon had just recently hit the US at this point). I had to stop writing him at one point due to some parental pressure, but he was super nice about it and said he understood, and sent me a card to say goodbye to our pen-pal-ship. Man, I wish I had some of those letters, but if I kept every letter I'd ever gotten in my life they'd fill a huge bin. Jhonen Vasquez did a mini-series comic called I Feel Sick, and I had read it when it came out (they wound up producing a squeaky Spooky, and I had one at one point): I wound up re-reading I Feel Sick at some point in 2009, I think. Possibly 2010. I hadn't been doing comics for a while, but something about I Feel Sick made me decide to draw again. I said to myself, You know, I'm just going to do this. I don't have to use a ruler. I don't have to do anything. I'll just do it. I had a regular Sharpie, a fine-tip Sharpie, and a grey marker, and I just sat there and drew in a big sketchbook every day. I think I did a page a day for a good while. And that's the best thing I've ever done, because I'm doing the same thing today. (Except for using Sharpie. Sharpie is not archival, so I had to cease and desist with the Sharpie when I was in college. They make archival Sharpie now, though!)
I like to credit all this to Jhonen Vasquez's wild angular panels. Some of them have hidden messages and I'm going to have to do that someday!
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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