Friday, November 27th 2009Monster Wars!
I have a box full of drawings I made in middle school and high school, the days when I really loved the shit out of drawing a hell of a lot more than I do now. I would draw throughout any class where I could keep it secret, sometimes working on the same drawings for days. When I was finished, I would just stare at it and feel a profound sense of accomplishment. I've kept a lot of those old drawings in a bunch of folders for awhile, going back through them every once in awhile to connect back with that old feeling. I've always had the vague intention of using a scanner to digitize them, and I had a more pronounced intention of digitizing and posting them here for the Cutthroat Apathy One Year Anniversary Extravapalooza, but obviously I didn't care enough to make it happen.
UNTIL NOW.
Most of what I drew, especially in the older days, were just random disconnected drawings of dragons, monsters or robots. But there were a few months or so that I drew what you might call my first comic/cartoon series. At least 100 years ago, I drew a series of full-page battles between as many warring monsters as I could. I called it "MONSTER WARS" (!!!). They're vaguely sequential, in that I tried to keep a consistent cast and sometimes a sense of chronology, and I wish it had sparked an interest in making comics a lot younger. I don't want to give you the wrong impression that I'm proud of any of this crap, but they kind of chart where my interest in drawing and style came from. And after all this time, yes I have some fondness for these retarded drawings.
This is the very first, which I decided to draw spontaneously one day in sixth grade when I was home sick. I really don't know what inspired me to do this, but a safe bet is either video games or cartoons. For instance, the ghosty looking fellow in the top-right is morphing his arms into a shield in exactly the way Venom does in the Genesis game
Separation Anxiety (it's awesome). I can't say specifically where anything else came from. Maybe that weird bird in the upper left came from those umbrella birds from Alice in Wonderland? I know for certain that the big guy in the center has goo for legs specifically because I couldn't figure out how to draw feet for a giant muscle-bound head. He quickly became my favorite monster to draw. You can see the same thing going on with those ghosty dudes – sometimes legs just don't make any kind of sense.
Even by this second drawing, you can tell that what I was interested in doing is drawing the moment prior to the point of impact. I used to have a lot of
Where's Waldo books as a kid, and I loved scanning the pages where tons of stuff was going on at once. A lot of it would set up a few characters on a collision course, but it let you imagine who came on top, or whether some third party would interject. Maybe one guy was about to get the drop on another, but then there was a monster behind him. Does the monster eat the guy, or just ruin his ambush? It added a lot of room for imagination and sense of movement in a completely static scene.
This drawing is basically three cases of that exact idea. You can see on the right, the ghost and the flamingo dragon are about to crash, but then the little slug (based on the booger-monster Snott from Earthworm Jim 2 – I hate real slugs) is jumping in the fray. Then in the middle, the ghost bracing himself for a wave of fire is unaware of the big gooey dude is right behind him with jaws wide open. On the left it's a little more clear what's about to happen with the fireball, but nothing's happened yet. The whole scene is a split second before all kinds of heads knock together, and you can figure for yourself what's about to happen. Partially it's just because it's harder to draw the point of impact itself, but leaving it up to the imagination makes something much more interesting to look at.
This was the last of the original Monster Wars drawings, which I intentionally concluded at the most logical place for a Super Mario fan – a series of platforms hovering over a pit of boiling lava. As in the previous drawing, you can see the goo guy is the star at center stage, with creatures like the umbrella eagle not quite being worth the space they'd take up if I felt like drawing their whole bodies. I don't know why I didn't just draw everything smaller, but I recall being frustrated having to crop monsters out like that, like the cool looking dragon at the top that's really just a fire-breathing head. Another example of laziness – or lack of imagination – would be that I clearly had trouble reconciling what the ghosts' faces looked like from the nose down. I don't know why this was such an issue for me but I distinctly remember trying to think up new ways to keep their faces covered. It's possible that whatever intellectual property that I'd aped for their design also didn't show the creature's face.
The goofy whale- and iguana-inspired monsters new to this page are kind of the last straw, and made it clear to me that I was simply out of good ideas. I decided to stop drawing for awhile. Also, I got better and had to go back to school, where I hadn't yet realized I could draw in secret to avoid the amazingly boring lectures. A few months or maybe a year later I made friends with a kid who did just that, all the damn time, at which point I started drawing Monster Wars again. But this is a good stopping place so I'll save those for another time.
