11:31: Clobbering time
I've been thinking about comic books. Not because I'm going to a comic con tomorrow, or because lately I've been having all of these conversations with B about the obscure and crappy and wonderful comics that our brains are full of, or because I've started drawing an extremely esoteric comic strip based on these conversations. I've been thinking about comic books because that is what I do. In a way, it's what I've always done. I think about comic books, or I think about wrestling, or I think about movies or music or TV. All of these things have shaped me. Honestly, I'm thankful for the way they occupy my thoughts. Sometimes I find my mind wandering to whether there actually is going to be a new pandemic, or whether an asteroid really is supposed to hit Earth in 2025, and I get panicky and start to shake. Then I just think that Reed Richards is going to invent some sort of fantastical device to save us all in the nick of time, and I relax. I smile. I think about comic books.
I started reading Archie comics at age who-knows-how-young. I devoured them, read the digests a million times, stored them and the full-size comics on the bottom shelf of the white bookcase in my grandmother's house. My entire childhood could be told in that house, on her living-room floor. How I would scan the bookshelf again and again, pulling out issues and Little Golden Books and Sky Blue and picture books and everything else that I had read a million times or more. I can still remeber the way the soft beige carpet felt. I can still remember staying home sick from school and seeing how tight I could roll myself up in my blue comforter with the snaps on it. That comforter sits in the closet in the front hallway now, too small for me to wrap myself up in any longer. Or maybe I'm just too big.
The Archie comics gave way to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Adventures when I was ten or so. TMNTA was published by -- who else? -- Archie Comics. I loved those issues like nothing else. Especially issue ten, where they Turtles became professional wrestlers, and my two early loves were mashed together in a way that I couldn't help but go back to again and again and again. I read Archie, and I read the Turtles Adventures, and I read The Mighty Mutanimals, a Turtles spin-off. I learned how to draw a Ninja Turtle with ease, and I drew them everywhere. Their football-shaped heads were much easier to master than the hash-mark on the side of Archie's head, or the little black dot under Jughead's nose that would indicate shadow. Jughead's nose had to be just right, or it wasn't Jughead at all, just some crown-wearing abomination. I never had any interest in "real" comics (as I thought of them), super-hero comics (as they were in actuality). I can remember a Christmas morning at my Aunt's house in Moraga. Myself and my two cousins (and maybe my sister, too; this is one memory where things are slightly fuzzy outside of the immediate sphere of events) each received a stack of comics as part of our stocking. I remember my dismay as I flipped through titles like Iron Man and X-Men and Spider-Man. I had no interest in reading any of them. Look at this one. A guy in a suit of armor? That's dumb! I would have much preferred to see the gang hanging out at the Chock'lit Shoppe, or perhaps take in six pages of Archie B.C. So saddened was I by this stack of super heroism that I pleaded my elder cousin to trade with me: my entire stack of comics for his copy of Police Academy #1. All I knew was that it had art that was a lot more similar to my beloved Archie than these other things did, and that I thought the movie (or at least what I had seen of parts 1 and 3) was funny enough. And it had a bunch of humorous-looking police officers crammed into (and hanging off of) a humorous-looking police cruiser. To think of all the humorous-type situations they would get into in this, their first issue!
So I continued to live my life of Archie- and Turtles-related bliss until I was 13 and in eighth grade. That was when I walked into Star Market and saw the cover of the comic book that would change my life.
TO BE CONTINUED
I started reading Archie comics at age who-knows-how-young. I devoured them, read the digests a million times, stored them and the full-size comics on the bottom shelf of the white bookcase in my grandmother's house. My entire childhood could be told in that house, on her living-room floor. How I would scan the bookshelf again and again, pulling out issues and Little Golden Books and Sky Blue and picture books and everything else that I had read a million times or more. I can still remeber the way the soft beige carpet felt. I can still remember staying home sick from school and seeing how tight I could roll myself up in my blue comforter with the snaps on it. That comforter sits in the closet in the front hallway now, too small for me to wrap myself up in any longer. Or maybe I'm just too big.
The Archie comics gave way to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Adventures when I was ten or so. TMNTA was published by -- who else? -- Archie Comics. I loved those issues like nothing else. Especially issue ten, where they Turtles became professional wrestlers, and my two early loves were mashed together in a way that I couldn't help but go back to again and again and again. I read Archie, and I read the Turtles Adventures, and I read The Mighty Mutanimals, a Turtles spin-off. I learned how to draw a Ninja Turtle with ease, and I drew them everywhere. Their football-shaped heads were much easier to master than the hash-mark on the side of Archie's head, or the little black dot under Jughead's nose that would indicate shadow. Jughead's nose had to be just right, or it wasn't Jughead at all, just some crown-wearing abomination. I never had any interest in "real" comics (as I thought of them), super-hero comics (as they were in actuality). I can remember a Christmas morning at my Aunt's house in Moraga. Myself and my two cousins (and maybe my sister, too; this is one memory where things are slightly fuzzy outside of the immediate sphere of events) each received a stack of comics as part of our stocking. I remember my dismay as I flipped through titles like Iron Man and X-Men and Spider-Man. I had no interest in reading any of them. Look at this one. A guy in a suit of armor? That's dumb! I would have much preferred to see the gang hanging out at the Chock'lit Shoppe, or perhaps take in six pages of Archie B.C. So saddened was I by this stack of super heroism that I pleaded my elder cousin to trade with me: my entire stack of comics for his copy of Police Academy #1. All I knew was that it had art that was a lot more similar to my beloved Archie than these other things did, and that I thought the movie (or at least what I had seen of parts 1 and 3) was funny enough. And it had a bunch of humorous-looking police officers crammed into (and hanging off of) a humorous-looking police cruiser. To think of all the humorous-type situations they would get into in this, their first issue!
So I continued to live my life of Archie- and Turtles-related bliss until I was 13 and in eighth grade. That was when I walked into Star Market and saw the cover of the comic book that would change my life.
TO BE CONTINUED