Evolution of Fast Food Heroes
Brew a cup of tea. This one is a bit more involved …
In the fifth grade, at about 10 years old, I started taking drawing seriously. When I say this, don’t misunderstand me, I never became good at it. I was 10.
By the time I got into some college art classes, I was able, if I worked really hard, to generate something—maybe—sort of passable (but also … maybe not).
I’m just saying that I began to take it seriously when I was 10. That’s also when I started drawing my own comic book. It was the first creative pursuit I made that had some level of cohesion. (As you’ll see, my spelling is and always has been atrocious.) This is the first portrait 10-year-old me made of these heroes:
Growing up, my modest collection of comic books was taken away in order to force me to focus on schoolwork. This failed miserably. It did accomplish getting me to make my own comic books. Learning from past mistakes, I hid these away and kept them secret. In retrospect, the would-be-punishment was a huge boost for my creativity. (Note to parents out there—learn from “Romeo and Juliet.” Separating someone from what they love only makes them love it more.)
Draft of an FF comic
Working on a comic series I started in the 5th grade, all the way through high school and college was … unique. Often it’d go untouched for months. And the plots sort of reflected this no-man’s-land I reserved for it in the back of my mind. Only a handful of politely accommodating friends would ever read it. If you were one of them, thank you for putting up with me …
Decades later, many of the events and characters in the comic stayed in the book. Obviously, a full-length novel and comic series are different animals. Many elements shifted to fit—but the soul of the story never changed.
Abe shot a light from his hand to reveal Mary in a beam … the shadow TOTALLY makes sense, shut up (:
That’s how this very amateur comic worked. I did it very SLOWLY, especially as my interests shifted from drawing to writing. Poetry was a huge pursuit in my college years (and that is more comic strip adjacent than either gets credit for). After many art classes and writing classes, I found drawing a story slowed me down. The writing eventually took over. Inevitably, I had to pick ONE.
One of the better layouts in the pages of Fast Food comics … they’re fighting caricatures of their Elementary school lunch staff …
Fast Food was a strange labor of love—continuing it for as long as I did kept that first flicker of creative pursuit alive. No regrets. It made me smile. Each issue I made, each terrible little drawing struck a collaboration with that younger self, struggling though unknown adversities to find a voice. The novel itself is a burgeoning from apathy into a better place for good reason.
On the subject of apathy, I’m not sure if there is a way back once you sink into it. I like to hope there is and keeping creative pursuits like this alive, doing all these silly little drawings - for me at least, was a step in the right direction.
