So, I found some of my older comics when I was back home for the weekend. I haven’t posted them online partially due to the fact that I am busy, but mostly due to embarrassment. There reaches a certain point when my older works no longer receive the “Wow, look how much I’ve improved” comment. Instead, looking at some of these comics now, I tend to say to myself “Holy crap, these are terrible. Where’s the fire pit?”

(Un)fortunately, I have not burned them. Some of the earliest ones are lost, probably a favor from my slightly older self who saw these and decided that the future must never see these. But many of them have survived. There were different styles that I used in my scribbles, so these will come in installments.

Ah, yes. My old superhero comic. About me as a superhero. Book deals, here I come. I don’t quite remember when this was made, but I’m hoping that I was pretty young when I made this.

As a young child with a short attention span and poor motor skills, I came up with the clever idea of just drawing the stars instead of drawing black all around them. I remember at one point, I did try to draw black around the stars, but the stars eventually got lost since I made them too small. For good measure, I threw in Saturn and none of the other planets. It’s not that I didn’t know about the other planets – in first grade, I knew all nine planets (before Pluto was demoted) – but I think it’s because I was just kind of lazy. Then there’s SuperJeff, with his bright yellow body as a beacon of justice, as he fights crime and supervillains with his blue cape, red hat, and some red/orange thing behind him that I think may be a comet.

So my one page comic book is about SuperJeff showing off his powers. Being yellow isn’t one of them. He asks the reader if you want to see his powers. It doesn’t appear like your response matters, since he’s going to show them anyway. First off, he can see through walls. And not just any walls – he can see through panel walls! He can see through the panel wall and see his future self in some weird X-Ray vision where the colors are all mixed up. He can also fly. Just because he is standing doesn’t mean he can’t fly, and he makes a point of it by flying through space.

So lets see: he can see through panel walls into a future with mixed up colors, he can fly through a bunch of crayon dots. What hasn’t he covered? Strength. He can pick up cars. He goes off and picks up a poorly-drawn car. The car doesn’t appear too happy about it, as it exclaims “Hea! Stop it.” And that’s the end. You know all about his powers. Your life is slightly better now that you know about his powers.

I distinctly remember that I had more comics like these, and they were somewhat longer and of better quality. I was unable to find them. But I remember that I created a Justice League for SuperJeff and his other pals. For some reason, I was afraid of copyright, so I cleverly changed the name to “Superguys” instead of the Saturday morning cartoon “Superfriends,” which was a favorite of mine back then. But then I screwed myself over and included Plankton from the show “Spongebob Squarepants” as one of the villains. The copyright police burst in, beat me up, took my lunch money, then burned my comics in the street. That’s where the other comics went. They were burned by the copyright police.

Anyway, that’s enough embarrassment for now. Part II should be up tomorrow, since I’ve got some free time.

When I got into junior high, I started another comic called Hoops. ”Oh, it’s a basketball comic,” you may say. It is not. It has little to do with basketball. It is called Hoops because the main character has a basketball for a head. Since his body is a stick figure, the only way I figured to differentiate my characters was to assign them different objects as their heads.

I am such a genius. I am, like, a super genius. This is comedy gold here. Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson ain’t got nothing on me!

I would have such illusions of grandeur as a child. And as a teenager. In fact, I still hold onto those illusions of becoming famous. I’m a little more down to earth, but there are days where I’m like “Yeah! I’m going to be the best comic book artist ever! My name will go down in history books! I’ll have all sorts of merchandise and live in a mansion!” Seriously, I considered making my own Hoops video game.

I did actually try to submit a bunch of these strips to my local newspaper when I was about 13. Honest to God, I made several photocopies of these notebook funnies and submitted them to the paper. I think my parents were kind of like “Well, sweetie, the paper…uh, they only accept the bigger comics like Garfield and Peanuts. Nothing really local.” Looking back, that might of been a way of saying “Your drawings suck, and you really shouldn’t submit these to anything.”

Surprisingly, the editor did reply back to my submission, even though he had every right not to. I no longer have the letter he sent me (it may have been an e-mail so he didn’t have to waste the paper), but if I remember he wasn’t mean about it. I don’t know, I was blissfully happy in my own world of comics while the world of junior high was beating the hell out of me.

Ho, ho, I am funny! Look how funny I am. This is one of the earlier ones, before I started doing things professionally with a black Papermate pen. I was very particular about that black pen. Nothing else would work. I had to use that particular cheap ballpoint pen.

Before I quit Hoops (or at least this phase of Hoops), I decided to ramp it up a little and draw clothes on them. Man, was that difficult. I mean, I can’t put different kinds of inanimate objects on the heads of clothing. So the clothing just ended up looking the same. If you’ll look at the second line from the bottom at those characters all in black, they are supposed to be different characters. Those are not different versions of the same character, they are each different. Their names are Al, Cal, and Bone. And if you put them together, they sound like Al Capone. I thought that was clever mostly because I am bad with names. If I every have children, they are going to hate me years later for giving them crappy names like “Bill” or “Joe” or “Kid 1.” Maybe I’ll make hats out of basketballs and stuff, force them to wear it, and call them by their respective hat.

Another thing I should mention that you might have missed earlier is that the whole pizza and the slice of pizza are two totally different people. I do not think they are even related.

Looking back at these, there are some images that look eerily like a dick. The guy holding the skateboard is one example. Another example is the last character drawn, Joystick. Then there’s the short series about a guy after his sausage. I don’t really want to discuss this further, but I know for a fact that I wasn’t good enough to make any purposeful subtext. It’s kind of disturbing and a little messed up. Still, I think some kid has drawn a dick or a dick-like thing sometime in their life.

Thing is, I have about three or four notebooks filled with these comics. I was a comics-producing machine. It was fueled mainly by some of my friends who laughed at my work. I can only think of a few people who didn’t think it was funny.

Since I have so many, I think I’m going to post a couple of these every Monday. It will be “Bad Comics Mondays” on my journal comic! See Jeff before he became decent at drawing!

There is a Part III, but that’s not going to be for a while longer. I’m getting busier and busier and oh I have so much work to do I can barely put this blog together (I find those comics really embarrassing so it’s going to take a little more effort to show them). But they will be posted eventually.