Ye Olde Comique Booke Airte Struggle

In the early 90s I got my hands on Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art. I never read it. Not really. I flipped through it a lot, and took notes from some of the examples. I might have read a few pages. But reading dry texts like that was not my strong suit. I'm sure I missed a lot of valuable lessons from Will.

Which makes me think about comics as an art form and how that a lot of folks talk about it, ponder it, and theorize about it. I love that they do that, but it's not my bag. Just like with tabletop roleplaying games, I love making them and playing them but I am not sure I have much to say about the philosophical side of it or the theory side of it. Why does it work if I put three dots after a word to convey a pause or some unspoken thing? It just does. I'm sure there are good psychological reasons and I know it's rooted deeply in the actual material history of language and writing. But all I know is I put three dots when I want to suggest that sort of thing. It's all feels.

It's ALL FEELS.

And I might not even be good at it. I don't know. I know that people always enjoy my comics, but is it because they like how I draw or because they enjoy reading my stories? I don't really know. But I suspect, honestly, it's because they like how I draw. I know that's why I pick up books from Philippe Druillet, Vaughn Bodé, or Richard Corben. It is not for the stories. Those are fine, and sometimes good, but it's all about the visuals. I love the styles, the colors, the lines. I love the mark making. And how those marks come together to convey movement, meaning, narrative. Even when the story being told is, let's be honest, forgettable as hell. Or disgusting. Or ham fisted. If it looks cool to my eyes, I'm still gonna love that shit.

For example, I just read Druillet's Vuzz for the first time and holy motherfucker what a nakedly savage and nihilistic read. Vuzz is a psycho and a killer and a rapist. He JOYFULLY rapes and murders. Yet Druillet's exquisite lines and pacing and figures are so compelling you have to love the god damn book.

I kept all this shit in mind while working on Hellion Cross. This is the first full comic book I've created in a long time. I look at the finished pages and I ask myself "are these good enough?". Dangerous question to ask yourself. I could scrap them and start over and improve them, maybe. But why the fuck would you do that? I'm not a perfectionist. The next iteration would also have flaws and I would have exactly the same thoughts.

But I worry about stupid things. For example, I kept the 4 fingers style. In the original Pan-Gea comic, all the characters have 4 fingers like in old cartoons. So I thought... well, this is a successor to Pan-Gea, I might as well be consistent. And that's cool. I like it. But there's a devil on my shoulder going "Do you really wanna do that? Some guy will pick it up and say those hands look dumb."

But I can't help that. When I did the original Pan-Gea comics I had a few comments that the hands were weird or that the chicks were too fat. I can't be bothered with any of that. What am I trying to do here, make art for the masses? This is my shit, and folks who like my shit will like this comic. That's really all I can do.

Perhaps the story is lame, perhaps the hands are dumb. I don't know. It's not for me to say, is it? I make the art, the world judges it. That's just how it is.

Arcades! Pew Pew

Personal post talking about my interactions with arcade video games.

My earliest memory of video games, I think, was Space Invaders. Two separate memories.

The Dinner Bell

There was a restaurant called The Dinner Bell and it was in the same building as a cab service and the bus stop. This was in my home town and it would have been sometime between 1978 and 1980. My parents got divorced in 1978 and this memory was when I went with my dad for a weekend. He drove a cab, so I basically hung out at the Dinner Bell while he was doing that. I had a few quarters he had given me because they had a video game called Space Invaders.

Now, this version of SI was a flat top table. You'd sit in a regular chair and the joystick and button were under the table top at the end. Folks would also use this table to eat and drink, so it wasn't terribly clean. I was fascinated and played it with however many quarters I had... probably less than a dollar's worth.

Being a truck stop, cab service, and diner all in one... the place had smells. Lots of them. It wasn't terribly busy, just a handful of people milling about here and there. I don't even remember any of the people there at all. But my grandmother worked the diner, so she was probably there too. The memory is fuzzy. The Dinner Bell went out many years ago and I believe it is now a Save-a-Lot grocery store. I don't think we've had a bus stop in this town for decades, as far as I know. But boy, every town used to have one.

Morgan's Grocery

I'm very fuzzy on the name, but I do believe it is Morgan's. This was a little grocery store way out in the sticks with a gas pump. In those days, roughly 1978-1980, my mom was living with Lee, who would later be my stepdad. Lee was a... lazy entrepreneur. He basically did odd things here and there. Not

handyman stuff, but more of a "let's try to sell this junk" kind of vibe. Mom met him when he was driving an old white pickup delivering loads of coal to various houses. At that time mom and I lived in a red shack her dad built and it was winter time. She had heard of Lee delivering coal and had requested a load. He brought it, dumped the coal next to the house (no cellar that I recall, but I was only 8 so maybe I'm wrong).

Next thing I know he's living with us.

Anyway, one of his little gigs was picking up cans on the side of the road. You could walk a highway stretch and fill a bag with aluminum cans pretty easily back then. Everybody just tossed their trash out the window in those days. It was shitty. Anyway, we did that. We walked the highways picking up cans*. One highway had Morgan's store on it and sometimes we'd pop in there, if we had any money, and buy some snacks. That was breakfast and lunch for the day: a honey bun and a carton of milk or a pop.

Morgan's had Space Invaders too. This time it was the traditional stand-up cabinet style. Every time we went there I'd beg mom for a quarter. Sometimes she's give me one, sometimes she would not. Depends on if we had any to spare**.

So Space Invaders was my first experience with video games. I played it only randomly here and there, and only because it was the game they had. If they had a different game, I'd try that one too. And I sucked at them, probably because I'd get to play once, maybe twice then I wouldn't have another chance for weeks or months.

Convenience Store

Ok, this one is weird. Because in my head there is a memory of an official chain of stores called "Convenience". There was for sure one store that was located near an apartment we used to live in and had the word "Convenience" right there on building. And I recall Ernest P. Worrell doing commercials for Convenience. But alas... my child's memories are tainted and flawed for Ernest did commercials for various stores and brands and it appears that "convenience" was the catch phrase of the time for little quickie marts and I confused it as a name brand***.

But the point is there was this convenience quickie mart near the apartment and we could walk to it for groceries and things. And yep, they had some video games. Almost every store at that time (by now... 1980-1982) had at least one video game. It was like having vending machines. Some company would bring you a game, put it in the corner, and you and the company would earn money from kids pumping it full of quarters. Almost no effort on the part of the store.

This store had Galaga! And they had Moon Cresta! My memory is poor, so I am not sure if they had both at once or if one came later. Because this store pops up in my memories more than once over the course of a few years.

Oh... they also had a silly little game called Pac-Man, but nobody cared about that, did they?

Stanford Auction House

Back in those early 80s days, we were really into flea markets and auctions. We would go to them every single day to sell junk. When we lived in Stanford (the first time), there was a red auction house on a hill. I remember it well because it had a flea market in the day, auctions at night, and sometimes they had cool things like wrestling. I saw Leapin' Lanny there!

Anyway, that place had a video game and it was Donkey Kong. Basically NOBODY came to that building. I remember it was very disappointing to my stepdad because there was no crowd, no traffic. We sold at the auction, which was ok. But the flea market was just dead. But they did have two things. They had Donkey Kong and they had a seller with tons and tons of old paperback books. I would look through them, searching for the naughty ones. I was about 12.

Donkey Kong was great. I loved playing that game. I got decent at it because we were trapped in that building for hours at a time and if I could squeeze any quarters out of mom, I did. And I plopped them immediately into Donkey Kong. But it wasn't enough to make me a master. I was, at best, a noob even at my height.

Atari 2600

I'm not gonna spend any time discussing this. I encountered the 2600 when I was 12 at my cousins' house and when my mom got a job a few years later she splurged and bought one. We played it constantly. She played so much Pac-Man she could easily roll it over through all the levels multiple times. But that's a discussion for another post. Let's stay focused on arcade machines.

The Pirate's Cove

Our local mall (malls were a big deal in the 80s) had an actual arcade called The Pirate's Cove. It was awesome. It was kinda dark, loud, and always had plenty of kids hanging out. By kids I mean teens like me. We owned that joint.

The Cove had all the cool shit. Yeah, they had Pac-Man and probably had Space Invaders. But this was the later 80s... those games were old hat. They had newer shit like Golden Axe, Raiden, and, my favorite, Rastan! And since by then I had started working, I had plenty of quarters to blow. I played the holy shit out of Rastan, Raiden, Twin Cobra, Golden Axe, Double Dragon, Outrun, and Gauntlet. Those were glorious days.

I started dating girls, going to college, and getting married soon after... these high school days were pretty much my last days of arcade magic. I haunted a few arcades after it, but the magic was gone. The Pirate's Cove turned into the Fun Tunnel (lame), home video games were dominant, and an era died. The arcades went into deep freeze for a long time.

*Jesus we were poor. I look back on it now in amazement when I think about the things we did and the things we didn't do and I put the pieces together I realize just how deep, deep, deep in poverty we really were. As a kid you don't necessarily know or notice that shit. You just exist. You play and eat if there's food and do what your folks say. But god damn, thinking about those years... those were rough times.

**Side note: My memory is that it cost a quarter to play arcade games from the late 70s pretty much through most of the 80s. I remember as a teen going to the local arcade, The Pirate's Cove (how cool a name is that?) and it was always one quarter to play games. Then suddenly we started to see these fancier, bigger games with seats and steering wheels that cost 50 cents and I was like "50 cents?? You gotta be kidding me!".

***Yeah, so that's not the only one. Before my folks split up but I was old enough to remember (1975-1977), my mom bought me a Big Wheel. Now, Big Wheels were a big deal back in the day. That shit was hot to a kid. And it was not cheap, I'm sure. Especially for poor people. But my dad allegedly had a job at that time and so mom bought me a Big Wheel for my birthday by putting it on lay-away. Now, lay-away was a term used by retail stores for when you would take the item to the lay-away counter, pay some percentage of the total price, and they would keep it for you until you paid it all off. It was a way poor people could slowly purchase an item that was too much to buy at once so that the item didn't go away before you had the cash to buy it. But my wee brain thought "Lay-Away's" was a brand name for a store. I remember going to "Lay-Aways"... I have no idea what store it actually was! Possibly Sears.

John Ra

I really don't care too much about precision when it comes to describing the arts. For example, there might be an album I call heavy metal and you say it is technically grindcore, I think that's fascinating but ultimately I don't care about getting it "wrong" very much. It's still metal. And let's be real: some of the sub-categories of metal are ridiculously granular*. Unless you're a super-aficionado, nobody cares. Heavy, thrash, death, prog, and black are probably all you need to describe the landscape. Maybe.

That's a digression. The point of this post is to talk about genre in fiction, a little bit. And to ramble. A lot.

I am not an avid reader. When I was a teenager I read what I considered to be a lot of books. Started with some books I can't remember and moved into Tolkien and Howard and others. But upon hearing the reading habits of some of my RPG friends, holy shit I was not an avid reader. I was a dabbler at best. My god some of you people read like you want to destroy your eyes.

Anyway, the books I read when I was young were mostly fantasy novels with a few SF tossed in here and there. I know a lot of people say that D&D expands kids' vocabulary and leads them to read more. In my case, once I started playing D&D I actually read fewer books. I was too damn busy making things up and giving them stats. Why would I read someone else's ideas when I could make up my own?

Later, mostly in my 20 and 30s, I read a lot of nonfiction. Far more nonfic than fiction. I was really into books about science, such as The Beak of the Finch and River out of Eden and I also read things like A People's History of the United States and Night.

Today what I discover is that my favorite genre of fiction is sword and sorcery... a sub-category of fantasy that isn't easily defined and is historically marked by some of the most egregious sexism and racism you can find in fantasy fiction. I never claimed to have lofty tastes, after all. I am a lowbrow artist, I believe.

But when it comes to making games, I really do love sci-fantasy. That is, fantasy with spaceships and robots. It's kind of goofy, a little over the top, but it offers everything and that appeals to me for some reason. Especially when running games. I like to riff and improvise and such a setting is most forgiving in that regard.

*I use Spotify a lot. Like a fucking LOT. I go to sleep with it in my ears on most nights. Each year they do this "wrap up" thing where they tell you what you listened to. Mine always tells me I'm "adventurous" because I listed to over 1,000 genres in the past year. How the FUCK are there 1,000 genres? I know for a fact I do not listen to all types of music. I've never been into hip-hop, for example. But I guess because there were a handful of hip-hop songs that I listened to more than once that counts as me being adventurous. I dunno. But jesus, "hyper-techno-death-thrash-grindcore-alternative" is not a fucking thing. It's probably just rock.

80s

WARNING: Rambling ahead. Just a whole lot of rambling.

I'm trying to remember life in the 1980s. I was born in 1970, so my entire later childhood and teenage years were in the 80s. I grew up in the 80s.

This is an interesting position, I think. Because I remember the 70s, to a lesser degree. I was there for disco and punk rock... at least temporally. I was a kid so I didn't know punk rock from pop rocks. I heard of disco, of course.

The 70s was before the rise of cable TV, but at the heights of TV's general power. When I was really little, we only had whatever channel would come in using the antennae (bunny ears). That was basically KET and the local Fox 41. I saw Emergency, Bozo, and The Incredible Hulk.

But anyway... the 80s came. Things changed as they do. Cable was a thing. We were poor, so we didn't have it. But we did have it once for a few months, including The Movie Channel. It was great. I saw 1941 and Excalibur and a bunch of stuff I don't remember. Hell, I watched Excalibur when I was 12... probably too young. Those scenes of naked women juxtaposed against armored knights really left a lasting imprint on my brain.

In the 80s, you had rotary phones and push button phones at the same time. And phone cords that got twisted up. We didn't have a phone at all until I was about 16. If you have never lived in a world without a phone, that is probably hard to fathom. Like... how the fuck would we have called for an ambulance if we needed one? The answer is we'd run to the nearest neighbor with a phone. When I was about 8 in 1978 my mom and I lived alone on a hill in an old shack without a phone, bathroom, or sometimes electricity. There was an old lady about half a mile down the road who had a phone and would let mom use it if she needed.

So anyway. In the 80s you had the rise of the VHS. We didn't own a player but you could rent one with your movies. If I remember correctly, it was about $5 to rent the player for 3 days and I think $1 per movie. So one of the things we'd do on some weekends, after mom started working at a factory job, was rent a player and 3 movies. I got to pick one movie. The store had maybe a hundred or so movies and my focus was on fantasy and sci-fi.. so basically this one shelf with maybe 20 films on it. I watched Beastmaster, Road Warrior, and Weird Science many times.

The other way you'd catch a cool flick was when they would put it on TV as a special event. They did that frequently with Conan, Road Warrior, and First Blood.

For music, this was the reign of the cassette tape. My first foray into listening to music on my own was to get my hands on a cheap jam box and score a few bootleg cassettes at the flea market. Alabama's Roll On was the first, I think. Then a cousin hooked me up with some AC/DC and it was all over for me. I was a metalhead. When I got my job at Hardees, I would buy at least one tape every paycheck. Often it would be based on the cool ass album cover and names of songs, having no clue who the band was. I didn't read magazines and didn't know anyone who knew shit about it other than a couple guys at school who seemed to know what was up. They clued me in on Metallica.

It was like that, though. Word of mouth was perhaps the most potent form of advertising. Because you weren't going to see TV ads for the super cool shit like D&D (with exceptions... there was the cartoon) or Vinnie Vincent Invasion. You needed your stoner friend who was a year older than you to say "Check this out, man. It's badass."

We were afraid of being consumed in a nuclear fire. This is not hyperbole. We were in a cold war with the USSR and a full-blown nuclear arms race was the name of the game. We had post-apoc movies like Mad Max. I remember checking out books from our local library about survival. They had one called Nuclear Winter that scared the shit out of me. At one point I planned to move to South America and live in the Amazon... probably because I had watched Romancing the Stone a few times. Kathleen... sweet Kathleen.

Let's see... I rode the bus to school pretty much my entire career with the exception of my senior year when I carpooled with some guys. The road I lived on at the time was hilly and curvy. If it snowed and school let out, the bus driver would not attempt to go up the hill. So she would stop and let us out. It was about a mile and a half to my house from there. About 8 of us would get off and hoof it home. By the time I got home, I was alone because I lived near the other end of the road. It was a weird, dreamy time. I don't know if the driver was supposed to do that or not, but it was done.

My friend had a computer (Tandy) and so we did play some games. Test Drive, Galactic Conquest, Bards Tale, etc. But the idea of an "internet" didn't enter my vocabulary until around 1994. I didn't get my first computer until 2000. I think I got my first email, a Yahoo account, in 1996 or something. But in the 80s, almost nobody had a computer until much later in the decade.

We did have consoles. Specifically Atari 2600. My cousins had one, which we played on their huge floor model TV on the carpet in 1982. We didn't get an Atari until a few years later when mom started working. Combat, Pac-Man, Pitfall, Berserk, Duck Hunt, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Swordquest!

Lots of people smoked. Every restaurant had ashtrays, every car, everywhere. Yes, you would visit some office such as a doctor or whatever and you'd see people smoking inside. That's just how it was. It was less so in the 80s than the 70s, but still omnipresent.

In my experience, which I know is particular to me, there was never any discussion of race, gender, or sexual orientation in the better part of the 80s. Sexual orientation definitely became a topic as the decade progressed, with the AIDS epidemic. And I know it was a hot discussion point for a very long time before that, but those discussions never filtered down to my level: rural white trash. Fuck's sake, in 1982 I was still telling racist and gay jokes in school. EVERYONE DID. And even though I felt that nagging sensation that "this ain't right" it didn't stop me from occasionally doing it to get the yuck-yucks from my peers, who were mostly redneck boys who probably still tell them to this day.

It was a time.

Another topic nobody talked about was socialism. Holy shit... the fucking communists were the enemy! Socialism was very literally a dirty word. I had no idea what it meant other than it was "people who hate freedom". The level of propaganda against communism and socialism that blanketed the USA at that time is incomprehensible. If you are a leftist today posting on social media about politics you really have no idea how lucky you are to be able to do that at all. You couldn't breathe a positive word about that shit when I was a kid. It was exactly as bad as saying you were gay... and that shit would get you beat up.

Not the best of times. But it had its charms in other ways. We got B/X D&D, some great heavy metal, some classic movies, and some killer comics out of the deal.