MERRY CHRISTMAS, ONE AND ALL!

This is about as late in the game as anything you'll ever see on this site, since, as a rule, teen-agers' art is as painful to look at as childrens' art is great. It's next to impossible to avoid a bad five years or so before you get your mojo back... and of course, for lots of folks, it never does come back. For boys, it's usually an ill-fitting obsession with the rendering of chrome, or abdominal muscles, or the particular curve of the spoiler on a 280-Z. For girls, it all turns into stiff horses with flowing manes and giant-headed doe-eyed girly men. Nowadays, the ubiquitous manga influence* lets clueless teens combine both these benighted aesthetics into a unified horror embraced by both sexes.
    My work here is a late-to-the-party example of the duck craze seen in comics fanzine art in the late '70s, inspired of course by the popularity of Howard the Duck. I had certainly read and admired Howard by this point (not following it as it came out--I was a bit young for that-- but buying them from quarter boxes, from which they were then readily available). I'm not sure if I'd seen any of the fanzine stuff yet, since at this point I was only reading current issues of The Comics Journal and its less intellectually challenging little sibling, Amazing Heroes. I believe that this may have had its origins as a possible candidate for the latter magazine's regular "silly cover" feature, though I'm certain that I never actually submitted a black-and-white version for consideration. I do recall another attempt to create a submission featuring "Nick Furry, Agent of S.H.E.E.P.", based on this cover, but, again, I never submitted it and it's presumed lost.
   The "Rudolph, the Radioactive Reindeer" character may have been conceived of prior to this piece; I definitely did a good number of drawings of him, as well as his springtime counterpart, the "Easter Beast". At some point after this, I renamed him"Randolph", since I'd decided that he was in fact a separate character. and not literally Robert L. May's beloved creation. I don't think I ever really tried to compose any stories featuring him, content to only draw "cool" action shots. Which brings us right back to paragraph one. Mea culpa!

*Before someone chimes in here, let me note that this is not a critique of manga, per se, so much as an observation that certain surface elements of popular manga styles intersect horribly well with seemingly-inborn teen badness. It's just a very effective template upon which a kid may construct doo-doo. Not that we don't have plenty of equally effective building blocks right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Centrifuge Incident

The device pictured is a hand-cranked centrifuge from a Gilbert chemistry set that I had mounted on racks on the wall over my desk. One raises and lowers the handle at the top to cause the test-tube holders to spin, in the manner of a mechanical top. It is the star of today's anecdote.
From the time I was 8 or 9 years old until we moved into town where we could get cable (circa 1987), the only television in the house was the one in my room, a big old color model that was primarily used as a monitor for the Atari and Commodore 64, as our reception was lousy. If something of interst to others came on, they'd come into my room to watch.
One night, when my cousin Susie was visiting us, there was something coming on that she and my parents wanted to watch but I didn't (possibly Saturday Night Live), so I bade them good night, crawled into bed and headed off to Slumberland as they watched their show nearby.
The next morning, when I got up and headed out into the living room to get breakfast, I found everyone staring quizzically at me as I entered, and Susie was having trouble maintaining a straight face. After a moment, they explained.
I had been asleep for something less than an hour when, without warning, my eyes snapped open and I sat up straight, announcing "I have just the thing! I have just the thing!" I then hopped out of bed, ran across the room to my desk, and snatched up the centrifuge. I pumped the handle several times, watching it spin, and, to the startled onlookers, announced "I'm not a weirdo...everyone's doing it!" Then, I quietly went back to bed and went to sleep. I can't recall if I took the centrifuge with me.
While I've done plenty of talking in my sleep this is the only incident of somnambulism on my resume that I'm aware of.

Swamp Jogger

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you. That is in fact the Swamp Thing participating in the jogging craze of the turn of the decade, wearing au courant (for 1982) jogging couture, and stepping in a dog turd as a an apparent homage to the ouevre of noted auteur de chien-merde Al Jaffee. What can I say? It was the '80s, man.
I was crazy for Swampy and Berni Wrightson in general in this period, although both were disappointing me with their then-current projects...Wrightson with his tepid and stiff Creepshow adaptation, and Swampy with his wretched movie and tepid tie-in comic (which would soon after the time I drew this piece take a radical turn for the better). I vividly remember riding the 20 or so miles to the (long-since demolished) Belvedere Theater in Anderson, SC to see the movie, rereading my back issues in anticipation. I also remember riding home in sullen silence, feeling like a chump.
I've got a good number of other drawings of ol' Swampy (drawn in the Bissette/Totleben mode), but they fall outside the time period this site covers. Indeed, this is straining against the boundary fence as it is.


BONUS SWAMP THING MOVIE-RELATED AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANECDOTES: A family friend at the time worked on a lot of movies shot in the Charleston area, and worked on Swamp Thing. He was on the scene when a good number of the cast and crew were apparently busted for coke possession (I don't recall the specifics). We were visiting at the time of the filming, and went with him to a sneak preview of Raiders of the Lost Ark, wher he pointed out to me that we were sitting maybe three rows behind Adrienne Barbeau herself. Around this time, he also gave me some script pages to study (I was interested in working in the industry at the time) from Larry Kasdan's new script. It was some time later when I was sitting in a theater trying to figure out why portions of the movie seemed so familiar, and realized it was the script I'd read...now in its completed form as The Big Chill.

Ducktor Solar, of all things

In the wake of the mid-'70s success of Howard the Duck (now overshadowed in the popular consciousness by the wretched movie), for a time there was a vogue in comics circles for drawing duck versions of popular characters (for evidence of this, see any fanzine from 1976-79). This is from a few years later, but I was really too young to appreciate Howard during its lifetime (my collection was assembled from quarter boxes at the [Anderson, SC] Jockey Lot from 1981 to '83). So...I decide to draw duck super-heroes. So who do I draw? Super-Duck? No. Bat-Duck? Nope. I do an anthropomorphic version of the at that point ridiculously obscure Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom. Go figure. I also did a batch of drawings in this same period of the X-Ducks (Including an acrylic painting of...um..."Ducklops", I guess), but I'm not inclined to expose those to the world. You wouldn't be seeing this if not for the urging of one of my most loyal readers. So, ultimately, this is her fault.