This entry has absolutely nothing to do with the election.
Crass, obsessive-compulsive, semi-autobiographical fiction projects have been in my blood even longer than distilled Red Bull has. This year they've come out in my young adult novel Punk Hovel and its forthcoming sequel, Young Adult Hovel, currently percolating in one of my millions of battered composition books. But when I was in the 6th through 11th grades during the first half of the 90's, my main outlet was a series of stapled-together komix called PLAYGROUND PATROL, from which I've posted some crappy excerpts before.
The plots mostly dealt with the violent crimestoppin' techniques of a dozen intensely neurotic, interchangeable teens, and the stories were about as dense as they could be for being made up as I went along, but got a little less lame once I was a distinguished high schooler. One issue dealt with the Patrollers being drafted to fight a bloody war against Switzerland, one was about the self-destructive Officer Ice stalking a beret-wearing hipster vegetarian chick and serenading her with self-centered takeoffs on Julianna Hatfield songs, another took my theater-geekery to its logical extreme and had the Patrol members being civilized by a super-mercurial Professor Higgins in a My Fair Lady parody called My Fairly Retarded Patrol. The Lerner/Loewe songs were rewritten so that "I Could Have Danced All Night" was now the vastly improved "He Wet His Pants All Night."
Issue #28 involved nerdy Officer Li'l Nemo, tired of being rebuffed by women, helming a mall store that sold indestructible hair scrunchies so that he'd get the feminine attention he deserved. But Li'l Nemo soon went mad with power, creating a three-story high carnivorous scrunchie-beast that rampaged through the city eating people. That was one of the stories that made the most sense.
But among the friends I deemed worthy of actually reading these pieces of crap, the most popular stories were the ones involving the Playground Patrol's first female cadet, Aphrodite Merrill. Up until that point, the komix had largely been an all-male production... most characters were based on real people, but I was shy around girls in real life, plus every time I drew a ladyfriend into a Playground Patrol cameo, she would complain about the distorted, bulbous head I'd given her (because it was the only way I knew how to draw human heads until I was 18 years old). As a shrill one-note character, though-- as you can see from the cover of her debut performance in 1993's issue #19-- the fictional Aphrodite Merrill turned things around.
Here is the mightily cowlicked Officer Zingzong (morphed into a spandex-clad superhero due to an errant explosion in 6th-grade biology class) giving Aphrodite the grand tour of Playground Patrol Central. This is where she meets bloodthirsty gun nut El Stabbo, one of the better characters even though he was basically just ripped off from Tackleberry in the Police Academy movies.
And here's where I mock Kurt Cobain's agonizing stomach cramps, just a few months before they'd contribute to his suicide. Aphrodite is not a fan of television, or of needless references to the cast of The Real World II a handful of pages later.
Commander Rhienhold-- something of a Trekkie weakling-- gets called out on an assignment with Aphrodite, Li'l Nemo, and Officer Tubbikins. Called out to stop a riot at a zany pizza restaurant, Aphrodite does some split-screen De Palma Carrie moves.
Somehow I had Aphrodite wading in a ball pit but didn't have her make any derogatory "balls" references. I have no idea how that happened. Thank God my writing has more insight these days.
The rest of the Patrol gets a little saucy about Aphrodite joining their cause. Officer Mice, wearing a Hard Rock Cafe shirt in this one, was supposed to be me.
And they's true to their virile chest-beating word:
And then, because I had to wrap up the story in another half-page, Officer Ice uncharacteristically punches Aphrodite in the mouth and she even-less-characteristically quits the Patrol. It's called character development. But she'll be back.
Because this was 1993 and desperate teens couldn't quite find the validation that the internet provides so many generations later, I had to seek it out on my own. I did this in Playground Patrol by forcing high-esteemed classmates to scribble their "Short Review" in the back, one per issue (except when I was feeling desperately lonely and would make two of 'em do it). This is from leave_bitches, who I would annoyingly insist join the LJ World fifteen years later. Everything's full circle.
I drew Issue #24 in 1994. In this one, the Patrol is forced to babysit at the wedding of Buck Justice, leader of the infinitely more powerful and successful Justice Patrol and now-husband to his swollen-boobied sidekick Jodie Justice. This story is called Children of the Corny Plot Devices. By now, Officer Mice was a much more idealized version of myself, wearing a series of loose flannel shirts and headphones constantly (which was accurate) but also an impossible charmer with the wittily sarcastic grunge-wimmin wearing midnight-black tights with Dickies shorts. That character twist was less accurate, but who cared, I was the one writin' and drawin' this shit and the badass ladies who tightened my corduroy slacker-slacks in real life would fall HARD for my komix counterpart. So if Aphrodite was my teenage idea of a repellent lady, here's the kind that I got all frothy over. This is escapism at its most slobberingly pathetic.
LOOKIT HOW FUCKING IRRESISTIBLE I WAS IN 1994, GIRLS! Actually I still like girls who look like that, although the nuclear-disarmament necklace and yin-yang earrings are a bit much. Fewer ratty sweaters these days also.
For that issue, I broke with the tradition of asking a cute girl to do the Short Review and had my drama-geek brother and cartoonin' friend jake_richmond do it instead. This many years later, he really is a successful artist, so the choice was prescient even if I still don't understand anything he wrote here. Also, this is a somewhat lumpy and less than flattering caricature.
Also in '94, I did this story where the Patrol is persecuted on a daytime talk show called "PAUL!" and then by the entire country, who are convinced that they're sexist and racist. Not one of my teen persecution complex's more interesting ideas, but at least it made for a special guest star.
But then somehow Bill Clinton comes into the story and saves the day, and everything ends on a pleasantly crude note.
Here's the review of #27, by a girl I had a raging crush on at the time. She would later agree to go out with me, and then 45 minutes later, inform me that she'd changed her mind. Then she started going out with a friend of mine, and when they showed up together at jake_richmond's end-of-the-school-year party, I spent two and a half hours sitting on the backyard deck alone, pouting and being eaten alive by mosquitoes. This was a decidedly non-Officer-Mice way to behave. I had a lot to learn.
Cover of #28, written purely from irritation:
The final Playground Patrol issue I ever drew was #29, in 1995. After that I got caught up being Student Body Vice President and my full-time onstage theater-geek duties. In this issue, Officer Mice is bursting to attend a matinee showing of Pulp Fiction, and his journey to get there with Ice-- and later in the story, Tubbikins, El Stabbo, and Rhienhold-- parallels most scenes from the movie itself. Reading all of these again for the first time in several years, the most effective ones were the ones that were as silly as this one, instead of the ones that incoherently aired out my uptight teen sociopolitical indignations. I was 17 and my artwork was a little more loose n' crazy by this point, too.
The wacky chain reaction begins with Tarantino suits in the Playground Patrol laundry hamper.
Mice was a hip young thing and spent a lot of time hanging around a local poetry-recital coffeehouse called "Liberal Latte." Playground Patrol was all about lassoin' the mid-90's zeitgestery.
The heroin plotline is replaced with a poisonous Hartz Mountains cheesecake, and a flared-pantsed Tubbikins stands in for Uma Thurman.
At the time I drew this, Pulp Fiction hadn't yet been parodied ten million times (even that Simpsons episode was several months away, and as if the rest of this shit doesn't give it away, I was a fucking massive Simpsons disciple). But my whole family of high school theater-geek friends was completely obsessed with it, and I did an okay job of incorporating the full constellation of Playground Patrol semi-regulars into the plotline. Here, the ass-rapin' hillbillies are replaced by the egomaniacal producer and director of an ill-fated Playground Patrol Movie from a few issues before. 'Course, I managed to get Aphrodite in there for one final, humongous-word-balloon spiel against anything man-related before El Stabbo gets 'er in a vaguely fucked-up (yet awesome) way.
So I haven't drawn any Aphrodite Merrill adventures since 1995, but maybe I should. Maybe one where a latter-day Officer Mice ends up having her as his boss at a crappy office job. That's happened enough times that it would pretty much write itself...