PAST EXPERIENCES IN TRYING TO THINK OF WHAT I WANT TO DO FOR A LIVING, PART 2
Sep. 26th, 2006 | 12:26 pm
mood: horny
music: Jackie Wilson - Higher And Higher

There are comix updates. http://animehistory.comicgenesis.com/

This reminded me of another thing I thought I was going to be so good at without needing any experience or talent. MAKING COMICS! When Jso and I were 12, our friend Mayzn drew some of the original floating heads comics, and we thought they were funny, so we ripped off the idea and drew our own stupid comics, but then decided we were going to kick it up a notch and take it to the wyld side and be more serious, and we ended up drawing out like our own TRADEMARK characters and imagined that one day we'd copyright them and the comics and stuff, and had serious talks with moom about what we'd have to do to copyright them and I dreamed that we'd become 13 year old comic drawing prodigies and people would go nuts over it. That didn't happen.

We kept drawing dumb adventures for our characters to get into, like swinging on vines over alligators or jumping out of secret air conditioning vents to surprise the forces of evil robots or something. I think I remember Jso made like a parody of that Nestle chocolate milk commercial where the kids are in a magical chocolate land and falling down chocolate milk waterfalls in innertubes made of chocolate or something, and in Jso's version they are killed by chocolate demons and drown and DIE. OR SOMETHING. Let's face it, these ideas are just marginally not as good as the ones I come up with today. :(

Eventually we kept making up new characters and shit. I think we had THREE characters who were cats (one was a judge, and any time there would be a court case, Judge Meower or whatever would be there to rule in favor of the good guys). Jso and I both started with two each, and only I could draw my two and Jso would draw his two, and usually they just had a bunch of scribbles for hair (see the trolls in Troll Police). Usually the only distinctive feature was buck teeth or a crazy eye style like Jso had. One guy had a bunch of lice (dots) that he could command to attack THE BAD GUYS. Somehow the comics took on a political stance that you would expect from 12 year olds, like 20/20 news being the good guys and then Fox Kids News being the bad guys BECAUSE THEY ONCE REPORTED THAT A CHIP OF PAINT HITTING THE CHALLANGER'S WINDSHIELD IS WHAT BLEW IT UP. Or at least I swore that's what I heard back then. I don't know if that makes me a Bill Maher Jon Stewart liberal as a kid or what. Or what, or something, ANYWAY.

One of the comic serieses Jso and I came up with was about the adventures of a couple video game characters, Link from Zelduh (DUH) and Sully or whoever from Contra 3, two of our favorite games from that golden SNES era. So they would go through the various levels of Contra 3, like that awesome one where the giant metal skeleton rips open a back wall and you have to blast his head, and blah blah, and after each "level" they'd kill such and such crazy boss and get a new item from their respective games, and also rescue one of our normal characters. Then at some point I felt like we couldn't make this comic COPYRIGHTED if it used copyrighted characters (Link, Contra 3 dude, bosses), so I figured I'd get around it by scratching out their names and Link's hat and drawing in stupid alternate names I made up and turning Link's cap into like a baseball cap or something (really I just scratched out the part where it becomes a tip and left it at that). A year later I changed my mind and realized it didn't matter, giving up on the retarded(!!!!!!!!!!) concept that we'd ever turn these comics into a living. So I tried putting Link's name back in and drawing the cap back in. This was basically impossible because our original comics were drawn in Uniball pen ink, and then I scratched them out in ink. So the only solution is draw over it in pencil and then add notes where you have to shine a light on it to see it properly. That was what I did for one of those Nintendo Power FILL THIS CARD OUT AND MAIL IT contests where you can win like 10 hot new Nintendo games and a trip to whatever if you win the random drawing of your card. The first one I did was in ink and I ended up scratching out half of it because of various errors or whatever I fucked up, then I drew over the ink in pencil and added a note to the Nintendo Power guys that they need to hold this to light at a certain angle to properly read it. Then I spent the rest of the month hoping to hear that they picked our card and we won!!!!!!!!!!! and imagining what we'd do with all those cool new video games we were just about to win and I promised friends and people that we'd share the wealth and maybe let them have some of the crappier games we didn't want. But that never happened. I was so disappointed that I never tried entering any Nintendo Power contests again.

Actually we did (a lot) but I think it is a funnier sad ending if we didn't. :(

Also I don't think I tried writing over the Link and Sully adventures in pencil, I just did in ink again. So it was ink over ink scratchouts over ink. Basically, a gigantic mess of scribbles that no amount of photoshop could clear up. Although I bet blue ink could fix it. :3

Our sad old comix could never be turned into a living even though I thought they could, exactly the way I think the Troll Police comix could somehow be turned into a living (OR SOLD TO CARTOON NETWORK AS A FINE QUALITY ADULT SWIM SHOW, SURELY BETTER IN WRITING QUALITY AND AS LOW BUDGET AS THEIR USUAL SHOWS). Still, I'm thinking of moving my AMH and Troll Police comix onto a different site and putting google ads on there so I could make like a dollar a month off of it. And then seperate the shitty old AMH comics from the NEW HILARIOUS Troll Polices. :(

Tomorrow: stories about how I thought I was going to become a world famous author, when I was 14.

Tags: amh, my life is very sad da neeeee?