Notes from my attic #2

Let’s look at some more childhood drawings I found, I know you love those.

That’s of the very first comics I made, if not the first. Ambitiously presented in a deluxe edition here, it’s Little Captain and Sailor, the imaginatively named comic about a little captain and his bud, a sailor. Any similarity to Asterix & Obelix or Popeye is completely coincidental. This is what the inside of the booklet looks like:

I love how the last picture of the last panel dryly states, “It all ended well.” That’s how the big boys do that. End of story. No lollygagging.

The reason I post these, is basically because nothing has changed in my life. For my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland, I still make stuff like this. The Lord He Knoweth why artists do what they do. When I was a kid, I made comics nobody read but me, yet I kept making them; now, as an adult, I make animated videos that hardly anyone sees but me. There’s a light that never goes out.

So, Little Captain and Sailor had a satisfying ending. “It all ended well.” This was a rarity, as I often prematurely abandoned whatever I worked on. I have crates and crates of unfinished comics–once wildly ambitious undertakings, masterpieces-to-be, until real life events interfered or I simply lost interest. At one point, I wanted to create a comprehensive comic about the American Civil War. It’s likely I was inspired by a popular TV mini-series at the time, North and South (1985). But as usual, I started to bore myself, and the comic more or less sank under the weight of its own insanely informative text balloons.

Let’s take a look at some more aborted projects. Indiana Jones–of course I attempted an Indiana Jones comic at one point:

Or how about an Agatha Christie-like murder mystery:

And action-packed thing starring one Spike Jumpstone:

I think the red robot’s design was, eh, inspired by ED-209, the Robocop villain. Well, I don’t just think it, I’m actually pretty certain. The hero’s name, Spike Jumpstone, was a pun on Bruce Springsteen (“Spring” is Dutch for “Jump”, and “Steen” is Dutch for “Stone”). His look was inspired by the impossibly muscled Schwarzenegger figure in the old Amiga game, Total Recall. That design was so over the top, it had my interest. I noticed little things like that and mentally filed them away. (By the way, my brother and a friend cameo as soldiers in this panel. The friend of course had to die a gruesome death. We got a good laugh out of that one.)

Where did I find the strength to start yet another new comic after so many failed attempts? Amazing resilience, it can’t be anything else. Actually, that’s me still. Rigorous self-discipline, a religious sort of patience. I survive on willpower; and also, a kind of natural asceticism that prevents me from craving material things, success, popularity, wealth. There’s nothing wrong with the marginal, the unseen. We live in a world where the most famous celebrities are the ones that nobody has heard of. A world where there’s such a thing as “reality television”, that people watch believing it’s all unmediated truth, whereas it’s manipulation, trickery, freak show tactics. Our world sometimes seems like one global L.A., where every waitress dreams of stardom. Fame, though, is a monster, and most people who want to be famous, and then become famous, end up unhappy. Fame distorts your reality until it looks like a Van Gogh painting. The few people uninterested in that kind of life though–well, surely, you must be a hipster, too cool for this planet. I’ve always hated the term “hipster”. It’s really just shorthand for people that can’t be readily classified, that go their own way, and there’s something sinister to the term, isn’t there, a certain kind of anti-intellectualism, which seems to have made a comeback recently. “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’, I unlock my Browning.”

We live in dark times. But:

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

That aside.

Surely the most ambitious comic I ever attempted was one about a little ninja rodent called Rodney Rat. Any similarity to Rodney Rat and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is purely coincidental. I must have been 13. Also note the very obvious Star Wars influences. It doesn’t look that bad actually, now that I see it after all these years. I’ll just leave you with some of its pages, and then everything can be stored away again.

Until next time…

Notes from my attic #1

I’m cleaning up my attic.

But listen.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration eased the rules on advertising toy lines via cartoons. He-Man: Masters of the Universe, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, and so forth, were the result.

Psychologists and other weirdos protested that these “program-length commercials” would pollute television and abuse and degenerate our innocent souls. Naturally, this didn’t happen; our souls were already so black and cold that we couldn’t possibly sink any further. We ended up with truckloads of toys, gullible little consumers that we were.

I have to say, I only really watched those cartoons because my brother did. Personally, I preferred Road Runner, The Muppets, Popeye. I also used to deliberately, against my will, watch cartoons that nobody else wanted to watch, because I felt sorry for those cartoons. I was a very sensitive kid.

The nook of my attic. Recognize Boba Fett’s ship? I’ll get to Star Wars at a later point, if I can find a way to reach the nook without breaking my neck.

That is all that if left of a B.A. Baracus figure. Right, the A-Team. My brother was a fan, so I was a fan. The team visited Holland in 1984–but only three of them. One, Hannibal, lucked out somehow and stayed home; he probably drew the longest straw or something. It gave me a strange feeling, I remember. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t be excited about it. Twenty years earlier, the exact same thing had happened when The Beatles visited Holland. Only three of them came over. I bet that if the Apocalypse happened, only three Horsemen would appear here.

A big, bloodthirsty crowd came to welcome the A-Team at the airport. It seemed like a huge event, the second coming of Christ (there you go, two biblical references in one post). Murdock yelled like a brain-damaged jungle creature, Face smiled and waved, and B.A. spouted confused gibberish at the unsuspecting kids. He seemed angry all the time. I hope he got himself sorted out eventually.

Let’s take a look at some of the sketchbooks I’ve found.

This late 20th Century marker drawing (circa 1978) depicts the artist being readied for his bath. A piece of soap can be seen on the left, the filled bath is on the far right. The violent, uncontrolled peeing and escaping turd, as well as the sneaky sideways look, are very typical of this period in the artist’s career, as he dedicated several other drawings to this particular subject matter:

Here is a self portrait from a later period, side by side with the actual model:

As you can see, I had a nice little Prince Valiant look going on. I had long hair to cover my floppy ears. I hail from a tiny rural village where the only people with long hair were women. Since I had an angelic face and feminine features, I was often mistaken for a girl actually–one of my big childhood traumas. I remember sitting on a sand hill, lost in thought, when a ball hit me. I looked, and this old man said to his granddaughter: “Ask that other girl if you can have your ball back.” You don’t forget things like that.

Donald Duck with a baby carriage. And why not.

I was a big Popeye fan. I dressed up as Popeye once for Carnival, a Dutch spring festival centered around “role-reversal and suspension of social norms”, as Wikipedia has it. Basically it’s just people getting drunk. I was Popeye, my brother was Zorro–photographic evidence exists of this, but common sense prevents me from scanning it. Anyway, I loved Popeye. Page after page, it’s Popeye fighting Bluto, Popeye in some perilous predicament, Popeye and Olive, Popeye just floating in the air and being hideously deformed, Popeye peeing violently, and so forth. I had Popeye figurines, bendables, Corgi cars, comics. I made my mother buy spinach all the time, up to the point where she said, “Wouldn’t you rather have french fries?”

I also owned a luxurious book that celebrated Popeye’s 50th birthday. I still remember the exact caption under one of the animation model sheets: “To aid the animation process, the characters were significantly simplified compared to their original comic book counterparts.”

That’s a comic from when I was 11 or thereabouts. Still drawing Popeye. And as you can see, I was happily butchering the English language, something that I still do, right here in this blog.

Until next time.