Image Vault: Society Of Spirit Leaders

Boy, it's been a big time for nostalgia. I had my high school reunion a few weeks ago, and now Neefer has surprised me by scanning in all of the artwork she stole from me while we were "an item" back in the early 90's... I haven't seen most of this stuff in over ten years! It's a happy-sad discovery, since I see some areas where my "art" has improved and other areas where I've lost something over the years.

I want to post more of this batch, but for tonight I'll just share this ditty:

The first entry is called Society Of Spirit Leaders. This is a very early comic strip effort from (probably) November '91. It's an embarassingly heavy-handed diatribe on peer pressure in High School, drawn to kill time during a family Thanksgiving trip. It definitely reads like the work of a teenage geekazoid struggling to make a "statement", which it was. There are plenty of moments where I have no idea what the hell I was thinking! Lame as it is now, this turned out to be my first step away from wannabe sci-fi/fantasy art and closer to the wannabe cartoon style that eventually led to The Bastich.

I kind of regret the portrayal of the Spirit Leader. By this time I was so completely alientated from the "average" student body that I had no point of reference to base her on, so she just comes off as an insulting caricature. Oh well, this is all good therapy!

The three punk kids who appear on page 2 are based on some friends of mine... or at least for a while some of them were. The guy with the spikey hair was my best friend for about a year, and then he hit his Freshman year and hooked up with the elite non-conformist clique, ditching me almost completely without a moment's hesitation. What a fucknar. Yes, I'm still a bit bitter about that. The NC's had their secret handshakes, and trenchcoats, and in-jokes and the whole deal, and no matter what I did, I was never cool enough to get into their inner circle. Of course, as an adult, I would know to tell these guys to spin on it, but at the time is was like being a loser squared -- even the dorks were too cool for me!

I actually had some good friends during High School, but it wasn't until I got to college that I finally found a sizeable group of people who were both "cool" by my estimation and also not a bunch of asswipes. (Pat and Bapper excepted, of course.)