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| Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (both Jewish!) |
Two Decembers ago, I posted a series on this blog called The 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar. It was 25 continuous days of brief, bite-size articles about Ed Wood, his life, and his films. The idea was to do the blogging equivalent of an advent calendar: lots of little presents instead of one big one. I think my modest experiment yielded some fun results, and I wanted to try something similar but not exactly the same this year.
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| A Heathcliff parody. |
This December, I wanted to shine some light on the oft-neglected Comics Fun! part of the blog. What is this? Well, I've been obsessed with comics and cartoons from early childhood, and I've been making them since I was able to hold a crayon. In junior high and high school, I used to draw silly little cartoons on notebook paper and pass them around in class, much to the annoyance of my teachers. My characters included Iffy the Troll, The Apple Scruffs, Margin Man, and an unfortunate family called The Melties who were all made from wax and yet who insisted on going outside on sunny days.
Unfortunately, I've had basically no art training apart from what I got in elementary school, and my drawing skills are minimal to nonexistent. My handwriting is a complete disgrace, and it's rare for me to draw anything with pens or pencils on actual paper these days. But I still want to make comics and cartoons. So my usual method is to patch it together from photos and artwork I've found on the internet. Occasionally, I'll take an existing comic strip and merely change the dialogue or the caption. If the artwork I want simply doesn't exist, I'll "draw" it very crudely in Microsoft Paint. (Yes, Microsoft Paint!)
After years of posting this material on the internet, I've learned that people do not enjoy my comics very much. Their typical reactions range from total indifference to mild dislike. A few years ago, I submitted some of what I considered my "best stuff" to an editor once and received a swift but polite rejection. And yet, I keep creating this material. Why? Because I find it funny. This is stuff that amuses me. These dumb, poorly-made comics and cartoons keep accumulating on my hard drive, and I can't bring myself to throw them away.
And so, until Christmas 2024 finally arrives, I will be sharing some homemade comics each day with my readers. That comic strip at the top is the first example. Basically, I saw a screenshot of a Star Trek video game that had been posted to Facebook, and I turned it into a little tragicomic saga about Kirk and Spock's working relationship. Enjoy or don't. Totally up to you.