The early days

While cleaning in the archive last week I located the bulk of the comics I wrote and drew while in middle school, the period of my first great creative endeavors. I say 'most' because I would create them and 'sell' them to my brothers. We had fake money, played store a lot, whatever. At some point, I was given most of them back. Dunno if the rest even exist anymore.

Do not start to think that because I 'drew' comics that I had some artistic skill that I never developed. I managed to barely draw some simple shapes and sort of tell a story in 6-8 pages at a crack. A number of them were based on games that I'd play to amuse myself and tell a story with in my head so you get lego built spaceships firing on one another and 'regenerating' damaged parts (aka reassembling the lego ships) or spaceships that look suspiciously like the cheap mechanical pencils I used to use in school.

The longest running series? Pac-Man.

Seriously, Pac-Man. Vaguely based on a combination of the arcade games and the Saturday morning cartoon it spawned, I did over a dozen Pac-Man comics. Most of them involve the ghosts trying to steal power pellets, a theme of the cartoon as I recall, and Pac-Man managing to stop them.

While most are simple crayon or marker based silliness, I was surprised to find an experimental one, drawn in pen, staring a pixel, explaining a day where the pixels lined up incorrectly and misdrew Pac-Man and the ghosts. It's not really funny as it tries to be but is an interesting stretch. Young Steve trying something different. Interesting to see.

I also did prose 'magazines' that generally existed to release my early not-quite-Doctor-Who fan fiction. While I don't have the issues any more, I have the original drafts so none of those... interesting stories are missing.

The weirdest thing I remember doing in prose at that time was an adaptation of the original Godzilla movie. It's weird because, at that time, I hadn't seen the film yet and scrawled out a couple pages based on the synopsis I'd read.

Haven't changed all that much, have I? Well, except that I don't think I've got some definitive Pac-Man fan-fic epic seeking outlet. That would be creepy.