my first comic book

[johncomic]

When I was little, How and Why Wonder Books were like my fave thing. I read those from when I was three (when they first started being published) till I was about eleven, and I'm sure they were a major factor in cultivating my early enthusiasm for science.

I was peculiarly affected by this one:



which was a basic introduction to simple machines. One day, when I was seven, I decided [and I don't remember why I did] that I would turn these six devices into cartoon characters... which I did by slapping faces and limbs onto them, like so:



[Note: this is not a scan of my original work, it's a re-creation from memory.] And thus The Merry Machines were born.

I had a notebook wherein I started drawing stories about them. My memories of these stories are fragmentary and sketchy... I recall one where they had a rocketship and visited other planets, and another where they had a time machine (complete with a control lever labelled P-P-F for Past-Present-Future). They travelled back to see dinosaurs, and ahead to fly around Jetsony-looking buildings with jetpacks... I also remember that Wheel could pull his limbs in flat against his body and roll, Lever could spin that board on top of his head and fly like a helicopter, and Wedge could slice through things by taking a flying leap at them head first.

These were wordless stories -- not sure why, as I knew how to write by then, it's not like I couldn't have put words into these comics if I wanted to. So I suspect that they would've been hard for anyone else to read -- I knew what was happening, but that doesn't mean I had yet learned to draw things so that other people could understand what was happening without any words for guidance. (Pantomime comics are a skill!)

Still, my point is this: the comics in this notebook were multiple-page efforts designed to tell a story. These were not cartoon drawings, not comic strips -- this was a comic book. The very first comic book I ever made.

And recently I got thinking about it out of nowhere and realized that, as I said, I wrote and drew it when I was seven. That was in 1964. Which means...

... I have been writing and drawing comic books for fifty years. Huh.

Comments

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

[I]These were wordless stories -- not sure why, as I knew how to write by then, it's not like I couldn't have put words into these comics if I wanted to. So I suspect that they would've been hard for anyone else to read -- I knew what was happening, but that doesn't mean I had yet learned to draw things so that other people could understand what was happening without any words for guidance.[/I]

No problem; people are automatically good at finding subtext.

"Wedge hates Inclined Plane. That's why he's formed an alliance with Screw, whose talents are uniquely suited to revenge."

In your current work, Space Kid and Stella are clearly getting busy behind the scenes, or want to, though your text has never said so explicitly.

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

Garrrr....

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

What happened to the editing options? No italics or bold any more?

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

Try angle brackets instead of square.

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

The square was deliberate to reflect another change made earlier, but here I'm talking about an actual editing dashboard with Italics, Bold, etc as buttons.

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

Oh... did they ever have a dashboard in the comments here? <-- failing memory

[ginsu.livejournal.com]

You can still see it here...

http://www.livejournal.com/update.bml

[johncomic.livejournal.com]

In original posts, yeah -- comments, no.