How I Spent My Misspent Youth

First of all, THANK YOU to everyone who wished me a happy birthday!  I haven't checked my DA in some time and was blown away by several pages of well-wishes.  You folks are amazing and I can't thank you enough for all the kindness, generosity and support!

And since it is my birthday, I'm entitled to a little bit of pre-midlife crisis.  I spent some time this week going through my old papers from school, old art, old correspondence and reminiscing about my carefree days before mortgages, taxes, identity theft, Possessed Alexa AIs and Alex Jones. 

One of the things I happened to find in my old files was a truly terrible and cringe-worthy comic I made when I was 11-ish?  I think?  



Some backstory; when I was a little girl I LOVED all things Tiny Toons.  The background radiation of my entire life is exposure to that show- from my sense of humor to my love of They Might Be Giants.  If there's one instigating factor of blame for the way I turned out, it can be laid squarely at the feet of Steven Spielberg and Paul Dini et al.  I was also a weirdo that loved monsters and, since my beloved and wonderful mom still thought of comics as Superman and Archie I had unlimited access to all sorts of books I probably shouldn't have.  I've written before about how important Swamp Thing was to my artistic upbringing, but the early 90s was also the heyday of Dark Horse's various licensed comics including Aliens, Predator and (naturally) Aliens vs Predator.   And I bought every gory, chest-bursting issue!

Sometime in 1990, 91 while I was consuming a steady diet of cartoon rabbits, parody humor and intergalactic monsters killing the shit out of each other I began working on a way to bridge my various interests.  The comic was called "Illegal Aliens" (a title that definitely hasn't aged well, politically) It would star my favorite character on Tiny Toons, the girl version Pepe LePew, Fifi the skunk.  Technically she seemed to be one of the main cast members, but never seemed to appear in many episodes of her own.  So my plan was to write, produce, direct, edit, draw this comic and eventually send it to Warner Brothers at which time they would hire me on the spot and I would make tons of money as an artist, just like happens all the time. Ahem. 

The plot was pretty much as coherent as you would expect from a pre-teen tomboy obsessed with monsters and cartoons and Nintendo and Mountain Dew.  The president (The Dodo character, of course) sends Fifi skunk and a team of other side characters to investigate a lost space colony.  There, they run across "Xeno-Con 93" a gathering of space monsters that forgot to hire a caterer for their weekend get-away.  The intrepid explorers show up just in time to become a movable feast for the  monsters, jokes ensue and...um.  Well, fifty plus pages on  I never finished it.

But then in 1992 Spielberg actually did produce a fan-submitted episode of Tiny Toons.  Ouch.   I felt pretty certain that sort of lightning wasn't going to strike twice.  Also, I was like 13 and starting to move away from cartoon animals into new, super-mature things like anime and Sega Genesis and throwing things off the local parking garage.  And, let's be real, my comic was pretty terrible!  The art was okay for a kid, but the story was nonexistent and the jokes were intended for an audience of Me. 

As embarrassing as it is seeing old drawings and whatnot, it's also weirdly heartening to find this treasure trove of cringe.  I think 11-year-old me would be very proud and excited to know where these early efforts have taken me.  I'd like to give her a guided tour of my life and assure her that, while at the time I was a lonely nerd, drawing cartoon characters alone in my room and feeling very much lost in a world that I didn't understand, eventually I will be an EVEN BIGGER nerd who sits alone in a VERY nice office drawing cartoon characters and has a TV bigger than my old bedroom. 

I think she'd be very happy to hear that.