What is something you did as a child, that you miss doing now?

The first comic characters that I invented were a duo named Fuzzy and Baddbagg. I was in second grade. Fuzzy looked like a fry guy from McDonalds, so he was basically a head of hair with eyes and two legs. Baddbagg was an odd triangle shaped creature that was cross-eyed, stick-figured arms and legs, and a perpetual grimace. I drew many many MANY comics with these two characters. I would draw them, ink them, and then have my dad make photocopies of them at work so I could distribute them to my friends to read and laugh.

I continued to draw these characters probably up until fifth grade. At that point, I had more than just the duo, but a whole gang supporting the main Fuzzy character including Batter (a baseball bat with bat wings), Blokhed (a square, kind-of-dumb character with a skateboard), and probably others that I don’t recall. I started adding antagonist characters and drawing whole comic books. The feature photo above is from a comic book dedicated to the first antagonist character, Dr. X, which introduces his Uncle Albert (an even crazier alien than Dr. X if you can believe it) and blob monsters.

In middle school I was really into the Farside, so a lot of my comics at that point in my life were single panel and odd. I still have the original drawings of those one panel comics in a box in the attic of my garage. I really need to fish those out when the weather gets a bit warmer.

As a child, I seriously wanted to be a cartoonist. I loved to draw and make people laugh. There wasn’t the Internet as we know it when I was drawing comics in earnest. I can only imagine if there had been and I was able to scan them and share with the world at that point. Or even draw them on my computer with software. Maybe I could have been like The Oatmeal when I got older, or XKCD, or if I was truly twisted, Cyanide & Happiness.

In 2010, I posted a couple comics on my then blog starring a bunny. Here is one…

I did revisit comics in a sense I guess, but I never again embraced it like I did as a kid, and sometimes I wish I still had that drive to create and share them like I once did.