while visiting my parents this summer, i dug up a stash of comics i had scribbled back when i was doing time at anwatin ("anrotten"). what can i say? junior high was boring and i spent a lot of time in class drawing. of great inspiration to me then (and still) was travis, also a drawer. here's a somewhat contemporaneous-to-then photo of the guy. note his well-chosen words of wisdom on the flip side.
travis started drawing this character BOB, a stick figure partial to wearing derby hats. in response, i created FRANK, a top hat man. generally speaking, we'd each draw these single notebook page comics with the aim of dispatching our dude in the most gruesome and offensive way imaginable, at least to a seventh-grade boy. the plots were often based on current events and sometimes referenced pop-culture, but all of them had plenty of sadistic, vital organ-dislodging violence and loads of splattering blood, albeit black blood, thanks to my predilection for black uniball pens.
i have scanned and uploaded all(?) the FRANKs to my flickr account in the "FRANK" set. if these artworks had been created in this post-columbine era, their discovery by certain parties would probably require some sort of administrative action against my friend and i. perhaps a round psychological assessments and police interviews? i was a committed pacifist at 12, but like a lot of other 12-year old boys, i was also committed to violent action movies like robocop and die hard. but ah, to get back to those innocent early 90s!
