Siren Song of the Stripper

My whole life, I’ve wanted to create stories. This isn’t news to anyone who’s been reading this blog even casually. I want to write novels. I want to write for comic books. I want to write movies. I want to create TV shows.

I’ve spent time writing poetry. I’ve spent time fiddling around with sketch comedy concepts. I’ve dabbled in experimental fiction.

Most of that is stuff that I’ve at least mentioned at some point or another here in the blog. (Actually, I don’t think I’ve talked about the poetry, but I’ve got a blog post about that on the schedule, so… I’ll get there.)

But one of the things I have really always wanted to create but don’t really ever blog about (or even talk to that many people about) is the classic comic strip.

Growing Up With Comic Strips

Either in their iconic four panel construction from the newspapers of yesteryear or the modern any-shape-and-size webcomics of today. They have always been an important part of my life.

The earliest memories I have of my bedroom as a child included a metal bookshelf. And in my earliest memories of that bookshelf, one book stands out to me. A thick hardback volume titled Peanuts Classics. The book that I’ve always assumed was my introduction to comic strips.

I can remember reading that book over and over again. I went from that book to the Peanuts strip in the comics section of the newspaper, where I discovered countless other comics like the Family Circus, Marmaduke, Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, B.C., and so on.

When Garfield first appeared in the local paper, I became a big fan. Started collecting the books as they came out. I even had a plush Garfield as a kid.

Once I got a little older and my tastes matured (and warped a little), I got into Gary Larson’s The Far Side, which remained my favorite for quite a while. Those bizarre single panel comics were exactly my kind of humor. At the time, I thought that the Far Side was probably about as good as it could get. However…

My initial exposure to Bloom County was a Sunday strip where Opus the Penguin is standing at the drug store counter having his purchases rung up by a clerk who VERY LOUDLY comments about the embarrassing nature of each item. (Nostril pimple remover, odor eaters, breath freshener, Preparation H). Opus, is of course, obviously mortified by the stares of the people behind him in line. The punchline is Opus outside the drug store handing the sack of goods to Steve Dallas and saying, “You, sir, may do your own shopping next time.” And with that, I was hooked. I immediately started grabbing up all the Bloom County content that I could find, and quickly became obsessed with the strip.

In either the 7^th or 8^th grade, my class was given an assignment to pick a celebrity and write an article about them being the Time Magazine Person of the Year. We were given blank sheets with the logo to make our own covers and everything. I chose Opus the Penguin. Got my cousin to draw him on the cover for me, I colored him in, and then wrote a lengthy article about him. Got an A+.

(There was another Bloom County project that I wanted to undertake, but never did. Periodically throughout my life, I’ve had the urge to build a wooden dollhouse. And for a long while, the specific house that I wanted to build was the Bloom boarding house. I haven’t thought about that in years, and I’m just now starting to wonder if I’ve got the skill to make a Bloom boarding house MOC out of LEGO…)

Anyway, then came Calvin and Hobbes. While Bloom County entertained me thoroughly, Calvin and Hobbes actually spoke to something deep inside of me. The conversation and interactions between the two main characters of that strip remind me in a lot of ways of the relationship between myself and Cyrus now. Or myself and any number of stuffed animals I had at the time I was first reading the comic.

(Oddly enough, when I first discovered that comic strip, I had already had a stuffed animal named Hobbes for several years. But my Hobbes was a rabbit, not a tiger.)

No Longer Satisfied With Just Reading Them

I eventually wanted a comic strip of my own. But I wasn’t a cartoonist. No real ability to draw, certainly not with any versatility. But I didn’t really need to be able to call myself a ‘cartoonist’. In Bloom County, when drawing comics for the newspaper, Milo Bloom referred to himself as a ‘stripper’, and that sounded good enough for me.

I first decided to try my hand at making a comic strip in 1990. I’ve mentioned producing a Max Headroom fanzine called The Two-Way Sampler. That zine lasted five issues. If it would have made it to issue #7 however, it would have included an 11 panel comic strip titled “One Moment Please”.

I had spent quite a bit of time designing a very stylized image of Max that I was able to not only draw, but draw over and over again with a fair amount of consistency. I had gotten an 8.5x11 storyboard pad from an art supply store that my artist friend Mike liked to shop at during one of our occasional trips to Salem. Each sheet had three rows of four little TV screen shaped panels that I was going to use as a template for the strip. One panel for the title, and the remaining eleven for the strip itself.

I promise he looked better when I was still well practiced at drawing him

But, as I indicated, it never actually got that far.

My second attempt at comic strip creation would have been called Bugstrip, and starred a bunch of anthropomorphic crickets. Emboldened by my ability to draw and then reproduce that one single image of Max, I started designing an illustration I could reproduce that at least sort of looked somewhat like some kind of bug person.

The main character was named Te (pronounced “Tay”) Cricket, a name derived from a typo when I was trying to spell “the cricket” and accidentally dropped the “h”. If I remember right, he was a newspaper reporter. Don’t ask me why.

There were several other characters I created for the strip as well, including an Elvis parody named Horax. Anthropomorphic cricket with a pompadour. But I quickly realized that doing a comic strip might be difficult when all of the characters could only be drawn facing directly forward. I could not figure out how to draw them from the side. So that project ended up on the conceptual scrap heap as well.

My third comic strip idea was one that I didn’t develop characters for, because I intended them to all be incredibly badly drawn, and wildly inconsistent from panel to panel. The premise of the strip was that there was no fourth wall, and the entire thing would have been them taunting and/or conversing with the completely unskilled artist drawing them. When I had difficulty coming up with those taunts and conversations past the opening installment, I quickly lost interest in it.

My fourth venture into comic strip concepts was to do away with the art altogether. The idea was to write a script for a comic strip – as if I had an artist collaborator – and simply publish that script instead of a finished comic. But I stubbornly insisted on retaining the four panel format, and couldn’t find a way to fit enough text in each panel at a large enough font to be readable. So that entire idea was abandoned as unworkable.

The fifth time I decided to involve myself with the creation of comic strips I had no actual strip in mind. I simply assumed that a project would occur to me. I knew that I would eventually have a comic strip, I strongly felt like it was fated to be.

In the meantime, I had found a cartoonist who was producing some comic strip output, mostly single panel gags, but also some four panel strips, all of them based on Star Trek—the Next Generation. So, while I was waiting for my personal inspiration to strike, I started to think about gathering other cartoonists, and putting together a comic strip zine.

I contacted most of my artist friends, and pitched the zine idea (with the working title “Strip Naked”) to them, and was met with a fairly unified “meh”. The most anyone committed to was ‘maybe’ drawing ‘a piece or two’ as fill-in spots after I had lined up several regular cartoonists to fill the bulk of the zine.

So Strip Naked died a quick death. And that put an end to my attempts at becoming a stripped. For awhile, anyway.

The Webcomic Era

Once I eventually got internet access, I discovered webcomics. None of them had the impact on me of a Bloom County or a Calvin and Hobbes. The reason I say that is because as I sit here writing this blog post, I’m trying to remember the ones I used to read… and I can’t. Nothing springs to mind.

I can remember a couple of characters here and there. A punchline of two. But that’s about it. I think that part of the reason is because there weren’t any of them that I had the kind of prolonged exposure to like I did with the comic strips of my youth.

I’d discover a new-to-me webcomic, devour it’s archive, and then be too impatient to wait for the slow release of each new strip and instead move on to the next webcomic with a large archive.

But the one impact that the webcomic era did have on me was the realization that it was the medium in which I really wanted to work as a stripper. Not lines drawn on paper, but more user-friendly (for me, anyway) images on the internet.

The Photography Epiphany

Right up until I got heavily back into LEGO in about 2012 or so, I had always been a bit of an action figure junkie. And one of the many lines of action figures that I collected was Star Wars.

One of the (many) Chewbacca figures I owned had him posed with his arms akimbo (hands on hips, elbows aimed outwards). They were jointed at the shoulder so you could move them around, but the default position for him was the whole hands-on-hips thing.

In a seemingly unrelated event, one day when I was in Salem, I happened to purchase a very very small plastic walrus. It was both inexpensive and adorable, and I thought, “Why not?” I brought it home and it sat on my desk, and I didn’t really give it any more thought.

Then, one day some time later, I’m sitting there and my gaze lands on arms akimbo Chewie, and I wonder to myself, “Could I put the walrus in his arms, make it look like he’s holding the little guy?” So, I picked the both of them up, and wouldn’t you know it – that walrus slotted right into Chewie’s arm like it was a specifically designed accessory for the character.

I sat the Chewbacca figure, now holding a walrus, back down on my desk and said, “A Wookiee and his Walrus.” And at the time I thought that was the end of it.

But then, after Chewie and walrus had spent a lot of time in my peripheral vision while I typed away at the computer day after day, a thought occurred to me. Since I had no ability to draw at all, what would happen if I decided to make a comic strip using photographs? And suddenly the concept for A Wookiee and his Walrus was born.

The original premise was that the main characters would be a pre-Han Solo Chewbacca and a pet walrus he had been given as a birthday gift. (Well, this was Star Wars, so I couldn’t really get away with calling the poor animal a walrus. I rechristened him a space walrus, and decided that all of the characters would refer to him as a walrus for short. And trust me, the contents of this set of parenthesis would be hilarious if you had been part of our Star Wars Role Playing Game back at the turn of the millennium.) Anyway, once news broke that Chewbacca was going to be in the then forthcoming Star Wars Episode III, I realized that I would either have to set it prior to the Clone Wars, or not use Chewbacca as the main character.

So, I decided to use the Chewbacca action figures, but rename the character Chorghalla. (A Wookiee name that had already gone from one abandoned Star Wars fan fiction project to another.) It was around this time that I decided to name the walrus Scruffy.

I spent a couple of months doing ‘preproduction work’ on the strip. Developing characters, designing sets in my head and so on. Surfing the web’s Star Wars action figure sites and making lists, checking eBay for potentially cheap figure lots, and so on.

Chorghalla would start the strip out working at a droid repair shop, although he’d have several different jobs throughout its run. He’d live in a two bedroom apartment with a rotating assortment of roommates. (An apartment with a ‘no pets’ policy, leading to shenanigans keeping Scruffy a secret.) I assigned Chorghalla a Wookiee best friend named Lraorlie, a womanizer with an eye for the ladies of every species but his own.

But the more development that went into it, the higher the potential price tag went. I knew that these figures were all collectables and I wouldn’t be able to get them for MSRP, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as bad as it turned out to be.

So, very sad, I decided to abandon the project. But not the concept of doing a photography based webcomic. That would stick around in my brain for a long while yet.

The LEGO Era

When I got back into LEGO (for what I am assuming was the final and permanent time) in about 2012, I was a few years too late for the Castle ‘Fantasy’ line. Nevertheless, I started buying up all the Orcs I could from Bricklink and Bricks and Minifigures. (Okay, officially they were ‘Trolls’, but in those pre-LEGO Lord of the Rings days, I never heard them called anything but Orcs by my fellow AFOLs.) I wasn’t really sure why I kept buying them, but I knew that I would do something interesting with them.

And then one day I’m sitting there attaching an orc head to a business suited body (for no readily apparent reason), and wound up thinking, “What if there had been an orc/human war long, long ago, and the orcs won and drove the humans to extinction? Would the orcs have then evolved into what we evolved into? I mean, socially and technologically?” I decided that the answer to that was ‘yes’, and that was the beginning of what was going to be a LEGO based photographed webcomic called Tekce. (Pronounced Tex.)

Tekce was an orc weapons designer, and would have been the main character of the strip. He was also an amateur historian and a sci-fi nerd. (I was looking forward to photographing scenes from Tekce’s favorite movie, Star Wars, where all of the usually human characters were played by orcs.)

I developed a whole cast of characters for that strip, too… but I knew most of them would be temporary. Because after each major storyline was complete, I planned on changing the setting. For example, at the end of the first big storyarc, Tekce would discover that his boss was working secretly with extraterrestrials, buying advanced weapons tech from them. Which leads to Tekce leaving Earth on one of their spaceships.

He'd travel through the galaxy for an arc, then return to Earth…but far in the past, during the Orc/Human war. There were lots of setting changes I had in mind for Tekce to go through.

I wasn’t in a huge hurry to get this strip up and running because I knew that my collection of LEGO elements wasn’t yet large enough to do the thing properly. I also had faith that my collection would get there some day.

Looking back on it now, I realize that I never really abandoned Tekce so much as I simply placed it on the back burner in favor of another (series of) webcomic concept(s).

The A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Gate

In 2015, I was the Superheroes theme coordinator for Bricks Cascade, Portland’s annual LEGO convention. This was a position I held for five years. As theme coordinator, I decided early on that I wanted to have a collaborative build going. The collab I put together was called Crisis on Infinite Baseplates, and would depict battles between superhero or supervillain characters from one intellectual property battling those of another. The example MOC that I built for that was Spider-Man vs. classic Batman villain Mr. Freeze (and a couple of henchman).

When putting together the very loose rules of the collab, I knew that I needed to put together simple instructions for an easy to build mechanism that would allow characters to go from one reality to another. (The first convention that the collab appeared at happened a good six months before the release of the LEGO Dimensions video game, which had a dimensional portal of its own. Had it been available to me early enough, I probably would have just used a version of theirs.)

The device that I designed for this was the A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Gate.

Alternate 

Reality

Transit

Inter-

Face and

Interdimensional

Convergence

Engine 

In between the 2015 and 2016 conventions, I started thinking about doing a webcomic based on the collab, using the same name. Crisis on Infinite Baseplates.

My initial plan was to just use whatever superheroesque characters were available as minifigs (starting with Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and then adding in stuff like LEGO’s own Ultra Agents and Ninjago lines).

I designed a team of original superhero characters to serve as a protagonist ensemble, aiding the side of the local heroes when fighting back dimensional incursions of villains from other realities. One team member was a shapeshifter whose natural form was a single red 2x4 brick, named Meta-MOC.

Before my plans for that strip went very far, I decided that I instead wanted to focus on the origins of the A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Gate. Who designed and built the A.R.T.I.F.I.C.E. Gate network? And why? I put together a backstory that indicated that the original users of the gates were a group called the CrossCorps, and I gave this new strip a working title of Return of the CrossCorps.

I came up with a storyline, created a cast of characters, made a list of locations that I would have to build, and then had a better idea and started all over from scratch. Same working title, but completely different storyline, characters, and locations. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There is probably something wrong with my brain.)

Neither one of those versions of Return of the CrossCorp went anywhere. If there were specific reasons why, I do not recall them.

Other Miscellaneous LEGO Era Strip Concepts

The first LEGO convention I ever attended was the 2013 BrickCon in Seattle. The theme of that convention was Pigs vs. Cows, and while the MOC I brought with me (titled: Conflict Profiteers) had both pigs and cows in it, they weren’t the focus of it. No, the focus was on the merchants that were selling munitions to both sides of the conflict. And those merchants were chickens.

When I built it, Conflict Profiteers was meant to be a one-and-done MOC. But a year later I returned to BrickCon with a MOC that continued the story of those chicken gun dealers (having rebranded themselves as ChickArms – an obvious parody of popular third-party LEGO compatible accessory manufacturer BrickArms).

And the year after, I built a third MOC in that series. Had I not then skipped the next three BrickCons, I probably would have continued that story with a yearly MOC.

During what would have been year four in that saga (had I been able to go to BrickCon), I started thinking about retelling that story from the beginning. In – as I’m sure you’ve already guessed – webcomic format. As Chickens & Guns.

I wanted to do a prequel-like origin story for the chickens, and then tell the story of them setting up their gun shops from the Conflict Profiteers MOC. Then explain the transition between the first two MOCs, explore the story around the second MOC, do the transition between MOCs two and three, and so on.

This time it was the lack of space that stopped me. I was still living in my brother’s basement at the time, which was getting more crowded as I kept obtaining things like bookshelves and cabinets in which to store my plethora of stuff.

So, I started thinking about doing a LEGO webcomic that wouldn’t require any large sets. Which is where the idea for The Brick Well came into play.

The plan was for the Brick Well to have one (unnamed) character, and no dialogue at all. The strip would start with him walking across an expanse of grey studs (an extra large baseplate, possibly two) towards a raised round block in the ground. When he got to the block, he’d remove the center of it with a tool from his backpack, and then small LEGO elements would start to flow upwards from this ‘well’ in the ground.

After the character clears a logjam of LEGO pieces from the top of the well, he is able to reach in and pull longer thin pieces up and out, which he uses to build a round wall circling the well. Then he breaks the original walls of the well, which causes the well to expand to fill the larger round wall.

And then? He starts building. He builds himself a place to live, a vehicle to travel around the plain grey land in, possibly a robot friend.

I liked the basic idea, but I didn’t know if it was a viable story, having nothing along the lines of plot, and just the one character. I thought about maybe adding more elements to it, but couldn’t figure out what. So it, too, never got off the ground. 

The Evolution of Ship & Crew 4 Hire

I’ve talked about Ship & Crew 4 Hire here in the blog before, primarily in its incarnation as a prose story. But it had its origins as an intended LEGO webcomic. And when it was going to be that webcomic, it was the final form of a strange evolutionary process to develop a story set aboard a spaceship.

The very first form that this idea took on was, strangely enough, a tale set in the far future of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mythos. Two of the characters would have been anthropomorphic turtles, and there would have been other characters with deep ties to TMNT lore as well. But I quickly realized that in order to fully ‘get it’, the average reader of the strip would have to be well-read in the original black and white Mirage Studios comic book series that ran from 1984 to 2014.

The next incarnation of this idea involved a crew carefully harvested from multiple realities by the mysterious Man in White, including a single anthropomorphic turtle, a Wookiee, members of LEGO alien races from both the Space Police III and Alien Conquest lines, an Orc, some miscellaneous humans, and a Quatro from Mike Baron and Steve Rude’s Nexus comic book universe (whose existence in the strip was simply because one day I realized that I had the right parts to build him).

There were a couple of other interim versions of the strip that involved shuffling around characters and crew positions, moving characters in (and back out again) from both versions of the CrossCorps strip casts, and altering the size and capabilities of the ship they were all traveling in.

But Ship & Crew 4 Hire was to be its final form as a comic strip. When the story started out, I had trimmed the crew down to four members (along with a fifth part-time member not pictured below).

The ship’s captain was Kerm Diamond, a human adventurer, martial artist, and general troubleshooter working for the Whitelighters organization (a galaxy-wide association of do-gooders).

The ship’s pilot was Rorauk, a one-time Orc soldier who now focused on his twin loves of piloting and fishing.

Security for the ship was provided by Hunter Red, a time and reality displaced superhero from a version of 21^st century Earth. She had the ability to track (people, animals, and occasionally objects), enhanced physical abilities, and a stealth suit that could render her invisible and inaudible.

The ship’s engineer was Gorvon, a Rownite (big dinosaur-like saurian) bodyguard assigned to Kerm, but whose real skill and passion was keeping the ship up and running.

The part-time member I mentioned is a time-traveler named Esses who works for an enigmatic entity known as the Chancellor. Esses trades helping the crew out with the occasional mission for rides to his next mission, because his travel device only moves through time, not space.

There was more crew to be added as the storylines moved along, but the five listed above were to be the core crew for the strip’s early adventures.

Ship & Crew 4 Hire was the farthest I ever got toward an actual strip. I had the first 34 strips outlined, with the first 14 of those actually scripted. Plus, I had started ordering minifig parts off of Bricklink to build my cast.

But then the story undertook one final transformation, this time from webcomic to prose story, and that was the end of my final LEGO comic strip project.

To Strip or Not To Strip?

So, after seeing all of these plans which went exactly nowhere, the remaining question is: Will I ever get to add stripper to my tiny list of creative accomplishments? Looking at my success rate thus far, the obvious answer is probably not. But one never does know for certain.