“It’s the Feirds 50thAnniversary! And I captured two of ‘em!”
or
"Boy! What all rattles 'round inside of that head of yours?"
Here’s my postcard from the ragged end of a comics career that wasn’t
I have a dog pile of anniversaries here: The 50thof the Feirds, the 40thof Captain Saucer, the 35thof InterStellar OverDrive, the 15thof Sci-Fi Guy!. So let’s walk through the picture on top and the story behind it to pick out what rattles around inside this head of mine in an approximation of chronological order.
In the beginning….
I’ve literally been drawing since Mom and Dad threw a box of crayons and a Big Chief tablet into the playpen. There’s even the possibility of this being the 60thanniversary of those crayons and tablet. This is a celebration of doing these projects and a back of the mind lament on not ever getting a decent commercial break.
I was born unfashionably late in the Baby Boom, in sort of the misfit end, the forgotten end because we’re not the oh-so cosmic & groovy Children of the ’60s, but the Generation Jones of the Saturday Morning Ghetto ‘70s. I did manage to sponge up a lot of pop culture: Saturday Morning cartoons and Saturday night Creature Features, Tom Eaton and the newspaper funnies often reprinted in Scholastic paperbacks and Li’l Abner, all American authentic old timers’ steam and threshing shows and Grandpa Skow having the world’s bestest little Allis-Chalmers and New Holland dealership, Estes and Centuri and AVI Astroport, moon landings and the Bicentennial, old Star Trek reruns and a new novelty called Star Wars, Monty Python and the Fourth Doctor, AM Top 40 and MAD magazine for the kiddies and younger teens and FM Rock and Heavy Metal magazine and movie for the older teens. Then there was discovering College Radio and Alt Rock after that. I was doing this as an undiagnosed autistic kid, probably with a metric butt-ton of ADHD behind it, all before that stuff was figured out three decades too late to do me any good, isolated on a pig farm in the Loess Hills of Iowa, in a community too small to have a fan or creative scene to share interests or trade tips.
Summertime Gold right on deck!
The transistor radio is a Panapet 70 much like I got for Christmas ’72. It’s obviously prime ‘70s consumer kitsch. Since I was dabbling with Cassette Futurism before the name settled, I was calling it “Panapetpunk”.
Our fans really blow!
I was a weird little autistic kid that was fascinated by electric fans for a while. Like helicopters and airplanes, the propeller seemed like spinning excitement, the magic ingredient that made them go. I was especially taken with the Samson Safe-Flex because it seemed more fanlike without a safety cage. In first and second grade I had an imaginary friend and cartoon character called Mr. Fan who had a Safe-Flex for a head. This was recycled for Fanboy, when he became a Captain Saucer filler comic in the ‘80s.
Hey! You’re stretching the logo out of shape!
The Feirds were one of the two big juvenilia projects that didn’t go anywhere, but from which most of the later projects flowed from, which also didn’t go anywhere. The Feirds ran from late summer before 6thgrade until it finally petered out shortly after New Year’s ’80 as a freshman in college. The idea was something like Al Capp’s Addams Family. This is something that I was too inexperienced to quite pull off in my school days. I also missed the point that the Addams Family was morbidly weird while my characters were just merely weird. I finally quit fiddling with it in the middle of being a freshman in college in early ’80. I could have possibly pulled something like it off when I was around 33-1/3 years old, but I was then tied up doing an InterStellar OverDrive revival.
Sissie Feird, not happy about being out tomboyed and out alphaed….
Sissy Feird is one of the first four characters from the earliest incarnation of The Feirds. She was created in the summer vacation right before 6thgrade and disappeared from the roster sometime not too far into junior high. The strip had a wobbly and constantly fiddled around with continuity. Sissie goes so far back, that I’m not 100% sure that was the character’s actual name. The original version was a slim and athletic Saturday morning cartoon flavor of a smart and independent teenager. Here, she’s prankishly aged and fattened up into into her 30s, along with her brothers, as one of the several sets of wacky neighbor characters revived for the Captain Saucer reboot as a backhanded mythology gag. As the problem with juvenilia, she didn’t have much of a character besides being a bit of a tomboy. Now she’s the instigator and one that bosses her brothers around. Besides she’s obviously being out tomboyed here.
Wilfred “Big Bill” P. Feird
Wilfred P. Feird evolved into the patriarch of the oddball extended family from Feirds v 1.1 in 6thgrade until the strip finally ran out of vapors as a college freshman, probably on what was v. 117.7.08.9.9.1.0.3.7. He’s obviously a cigar chomping, pinstriped big businessman. Afterwards, he appeared as a mythology joke in random places in Captain Saucer and the Fanboy filler comics. Big Bill was finally made part of the InterStellar OverDrive continuity as the owner of the L4 Space Station. If you’re wondering about the relationship with Sissie, it’s uncle and some sort of niece.
Oddly, I had adult characters instead of teen characters while I was a teen. This probably has a lot to do with being an oddball outcast and feeling alienated and estranged from an underperforming school that was made for the pets, jocks, and normals, but not for me. Add in that I wanted to be my parents’ age and out on my own and not having to put up with my dumb school. Then I flubbed it by playing the adults a little too broad and juvenile.
“Only you could work ‘you gotta be crazy if you think you can build a time machine!’ the other way around!
The Inventer & Igor was a sixth grade and junior high era sister strip to The Feirds. Maybe even a brother strip since the earliest versions of Wilfred and the Inventer were siblings. The Inventer was a wacky guy making wacky things. Igor was his big dumb assistant. Gears was a pig that spoke in thought bubbles, a Snoopy influence back when Peanuts was at its kiddie amusing peak. It’s been since revived, as sort of “Jay Ward’s Blackadder meets Green Acres”, the characters fleshed out, such as the Inventer being an aging Boomer curmudgeon, and an ensemble of new characters added. Such is crazy girl, Electronischerobotikwerke GmbH “Dizzy” Timing to spin things even more off kilter. I need to get off my butt and do the animatic that I should have done five or more or more ago.
Steam AM Top 40.
Out of the two of the juvenilia projects that had long influences, Felint was number two and a half. There are five different pieces of Steampunk in this drawing as a testament to that. This was a boy’s first rattle brained juvenilia attempt at a Skiffy ‘verse: a post-apocalyptical world dominated by catfolk with a Model-T level of technology, a cyclopean human survivor friend, and some artificial life forms for villains, all thrown together willy-nilly. It wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I realized that this was sort of Planet of the Apes, the original franchise was popular with kiddies of my age, except with teh kittehz made me feel like facepalming myself. This proto-Steampunk was done back in my junior high days, despite a psycho-bat homeroom teacher trying to bully the creativity and individuality out of me. She was tenured before steam came in real life and didn’t think it was too funny. I tongue in cheek call this old stuff Steam AM Top 40. I had a rich vein of juvenilia to mine and recycle for the Steampunk for the Leians in InterStellar OverDrive and the Brassellians from Sci-Fi Guy!
I’d like to think that I was bright for doing Steampunkish stuff back then, but it was probably part of a minor zeitgeist. I was a kid who loved steam & threshing shows back in the days when old men in their sixties grew up with Model Ts, biplanes, and steam tractors, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Great Race, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, the Wonka factory, and the magic flying machines in Here Comes the Grump and Here Comes Peter Cottontail all were in TV reruns. My first real Science Fiction was H.G. Wells with his lush Victorian prose. Mix in science fantasies primed by Star Trek starting its perpetual reruns and Skylab was winding down. All were there to mash-up in an isolated bored kid’s head to keep his brain alive.
In space, no one can hear you Jake brake….
Star Truck is the other bit of juvenilia that a lot my later projects grew out of. Yet another nerdy teenager in the ‘70s does a parody of his favorite TV show back when it was in perpetual reruns after school or after the late news. Mr. Lippold was the good teacher that published this in the school paper, despite not having anything to do with school. This kept my spirit alive in the year between between psycho bat and the two biddies that dumped on the Chinon.
Qwewy, from the days of the Bicentennial and Centuri catalogs.
The Qwewy was an imaginary creature that I made up at the start of the Bicentennial summer of ’76. It’s some exotic alien fractal lifeform that’s always migrating through space in rules of three. At the end of summer, I imagined capturing one and putting it in the family attic for safekeeping. I wonder if it’s still there….
I hate smiley faces but I dig cyclopes….
“Cyclopses” was the missing link between Star Truck and Captain Saucer. It was originally conceived as Star Truck; the Movie but sprawled out into me bragging about this imaginary epic animated anthology Sci-Fi parody that I thought I was going to do.
Polli Phemus and the author’s thumbprint of the Cyclops smiley originated with “Cyclopses”. The original incarnation of her popped up in in the late ‘70s, beating the Futurama character by two decades or so. The one-eyed smiley buttons and stickers were later rationalized as freebies from Cyclops Gyros, fictional regional franchise that makes monster gyros and burgers. That’s a riff on the local King Kong franchise which makes burgers and gyros apparently fit for a 900-pound gorilla. The Cyclops franchise is so regional that it exists across all my ‘verses.
Groening and I use to have a mutual acquaintance... Which sometimes makes me go hmmmm….
Party like it’s 1888!
Space 1888, was an idea associated with “Cyclopses”. The idea was a mainly a Steam-powered parody of Space 1999 set in the 19thCentury. It didn’t get farther than one and a half sketches and more daydreaming out loud. By the way, that “spaceship’ is a cross between a boxcar and the Clement Ader wannabe flying machine the Avion III from the 1890s. This was the last gasp of my original Steam AM Top 40. My steam dreams skipped over the ‘80s but were mined in the ‘90s and beyond.
Super 8 is great!
I saved up a whole year to buy a Chinon 506SMXL, deluded that I could shoot and animated feature like “Cyclopses” on it, that Super 8 sound could be blown up to 35mm, and that I would get support from my school. A couple of teachers dumped on it because I wasn’t on the honor roll. Tamp in some unfavoritism to an undiagnosed autistic oddball with the vicious circle of not getting talents and interests supported for not doing well in school and not doing well in school for not having talents and interests supported. Plus, don’t get something like this setup unless you have an Alexander Payne sized allowance, high school, support, and circle of friends. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have gotten this white elephant and instead spent the money to buy a respectable survivor Studebaker Bullet-nose or Silver Hawk and used the left-over change on getting all the Centuri fantasy kits. It turned out that my school that was bad and failing enough that it was later put out of its misery with the district going through dissolution.
Studebaker is greater!
Herman the Lion was a fan comic for a Studebaker club newsletter from 1980. Herman owned one of those old round pickups. ‘40s and ‘50s Studebakers in were my gateway to discovering Art Deco and Googie, which lead to Dieselpunk and Atompunk before they had names. Obviously, they’re the bestest car they don’t make more by far! Plus, I have affinity to Studebaker for having good ideas that didn’t sell well and an undeserved bad reputation, much like Alt Rock in the ‘80s and Apple in the ‘90s. Herman had a girlfriend, which evolved into a proliferation of catgirl pinups and to Flexia and the Leians in Captain Saucer and InterStellar OverDrive. Skinny Herman got an ornery reincarnation in the Captain Saucer reboot as Pithel, an overly pumped gym kitty.
Pardon the digression, but in the middle of writing this I’ve belatedly tripped over the insight that there are the two big traumas in my life: the original adopted kid abandonment trauma and dropping out of college for the first-time trauma. Somebody with rejection issues is also an autistic getting a too much rejection for being different than the others. And then I felt that my future had been shot out from under me before my life really started. I had a crisis of faith that ended up in losing the religion. Prayers for strength, insight, and help weren’t answered and Mom and Dad or some professor or some counselor or The Father and Son and Holy Ghost or his friend in the fire truck or his friend with the rowboat or his friend with the helicopter didn’t step in to save me. God slammed a door without opening another one. I could have been an engineer living a life of quiet servitude, the the cartoon thing would have gotten no farther than daydreaming about “Cyclopses” with maybe sketches in various ‘zines. The comics thing was trying to kick open a door. Not to mention a lonely isolated autie with depression issue trying to cheer himself up by doing screwball stuff. All of which was then met with the endless toxic gate keeping from fandom and prodom feeding into the abandonment and rejection issues.
I do feel as much badly served by the psychiatric profession as I was the education system. It took over three decades too late to figure out Autism to help me because they got get stuck on the Pop Psychology of things like “refrigerator mommies” without bothering to clinically look! Let’s not do their jobs and miss both flavors of trauma altogether. Let’s not try to fix any problems, but milk insurance money and some of the family bank account! All the while trying to thorazine somebody into another dumb ‘n’ numb normal! I feel that one of the overlooked reasons that mental health has a stigma is how badly it’s professionally done in the US. Like education or faith healing, if it’s not working, it’s obviously the fault of the customer!
Of course, he rides a white saucer…..
I daydreamed out loud a good show about “Cyclopses” through my first bout of college. After I dropped out of college for the first time, I finally realized that it’s not going to come from a lonely, isolated person on a pig farm with a Chinon 506SMXL. The thing was condensed down to Captain Space, soon retitled to Captain Saucer as a comic book seemed doable. Then endless prankish fate and circumstances got into the way of that.
Captain Saucer is an ornery mock-heroic “Captain Space defender of Earth” parody. Coming out of the cut corner, moving mouth, Saturday morning ghetto and going into the self-serving Supply Side ‘80s had a lot of influence to why the comic was what it was. Of course, MAD Magazine and other parodies had a lot of influence. Then there was the Al Capp influence, which is why the comic had an ornery, obnoxious streak, and a fondness for buxom fanservice. This turned out to be at odds with ‘80s fandom, which was then dominated by the “Frodo Lives” generation, who wanted their parody more mellow and affectionate like a hobbit petting a tribble or the Close Encounters alien flipping the Vulcan peace sign. \\//
The atom is your friend. He glows and then he splits….
The interior of the Hall of Goodness from Captain Saucer was probably not all that authentically Art Deco or Googie, but somebody without the training was trying to mimic the retro-futuristic flavors of those based on old stuff that older relatives had and, of course, those Studebakers. Having an Atompunk streak in the early ‘80s before it had a name also didn’t sit well with the No Nuke Hippies dominating fandom. I feel the Captain Saucer was a blown opportunity to do a Johnny Bravo meets Futurama meets Dieselpunk and Atompunk, down to the peacock pompadours, cyclops babes, blow by, and gold-anodized chrome trefoils back in the ‘80s before that stuff existed.
User friendly interface….
I grew up with the pop culture idea of a computer based on ‘50s to the ‘70s Skiffy or NASA Moon Race. It’s amazing the this doesn’t have spinning reel tape drives to go with the blinken lights. This is before real life bit and shrunk computers down to little commodity consumer boxen infected with Messysoft and other viruses.
Retro electronics all warmed up...
When I was a kid, I would dissect dead tube radios, in the name of science, of course. The tubes were sometimes given a second life powering imaginary devices. As I got older, the tubes were long lost, but they lived on in Comics devices on paper. I like the internal contradiction of tubes being used in mock futuristic devices. This is years before fandom caught up with Atompunk. I’m now working as an Electronic Technician.
The earliest sketch from late ‘80 before the name and species was nailed down.
Captain Saucer went through some reboots. In the original first series Captain Saucer, Twinkles was a dragon that thought he was a really big cat that could breathe fire. He was retconned as a parody of the Xenomorph from the Aliens franchise in the second series reboot of Captain Saucer. When Captain Saucer was rebooted into InterStellar OverDrive, Twinkles initially came over, but then disappeared as ISOD got retconned to be less loopy. Then an even more parody version of him popped up in the Captain Saucer Reboot.
Twinkles in the Captain Saucer reboot. Also, Harrison, the newest Captain Saucer one the day he was hired, Wingding, SM-10, and Horton Nurflugel.
Captain Saucer original cast, early issue, late ‘82.
I had another bout with Moo U. This time I was hoping for things to click in the art program. Maybe it was more like things to clique, because nearly everything went wrong. I wanted to be with the Science Fiction fan scene that I didn’t have on the farm, but somebody had to prove they’re such a big alpha mean queen by picking on a “retarded farmboy” and thought that they were right with two yes sisters and a lot of the clique nodding in agreement. I wanted to be with the New Wave scene that I didn’t have on the farm, but orange-haired somebody else had to prove that they’re such a big alpha mean queen picking on a “retarded farm boy” and thought that was right with two gay yes-men, a little girl friend, and a lot of the clique nodding in agreement. I didn’t have much good art training from high school to build on. I didn’t have the prerequisites for the prerequisites to learn the things that I came there to learn in the year and a half including a summer semester that I suffered through there before burning out. This is like learning main things like how to do the lettering better, expressive inking, fixing lingering herky-jerky issues in the face and figure rendering or writing, or how to do four-color separations back when they were done by hand. I was neuro-divergent before it was a dealie in a sea of pretty preppies, with of course with the extra brownie points for being a younger prettier, brown-nosed version of professor, which my autie-ass self definitely wasn’t. Too much was hands-off and written and graded on favorites. Adding to this unfavoritism was getting screwed over by “Beardshear”, aka: the administration. Piling on was a worthless councilor who saw a student getting hurt by the system and siding with the system because she was a cheap little Beardshear tool. I had a problem and she’d digress with insulting my clothes or breath, or spinning some tale of some poor little black child in the ghetto. “But this doesn’t solve my problem!” “But his problem was much worse than yours, isn’t it?” Or she’ll tell me to get some Christian religion to forgive their mistreatment of me and pay more time and money to go through the same thing over again next semester or year hoping that it’s not more of the same. I’m mad at myself for not realizing then that this was an admission that I was being badly treated. Not that I could have done much about it. The beginning of my end there was having to take English 104 over after taking English 105, because of some technicality that a faceless Beardshear bureaucrat pulled out of their profane posterior, and her just saying bend over and take it, if being born again enough not to use exactly those words.
At least I did help Quarkstomper and Pat Moriarity get started while I was there. I feel Pat Pat was somebody like me with the opposite of my luck. He blew off the provincial and cliquish Ames and Des Moines fanboy scenes. He moved to Minneapolis on the day before it became the big Alt Rock scene in the ‘80s and then moved to Seattle on the day before it became the big Alt scene in the ‘90s. He made connections that clicked. He went on to work for Fantagraphics, have his Comics published, be the Rolling Stone Hot Cartoonist of 1996, a Golden Tooney winner, and other acclaim. I fix Delivery Bar Code Systems for the USPS.
Stillborn attempt at a Captain Saucer Indie from late ‘83. Farm Crisis left me without the scratch and timid to publish it.
Captain Saucer had Indie Comics aspirations. I was trying to make my own new future after I felt the previous one had been shot out from under me. This was doubled down on when the Mutant Turtles found its endless commercial niche and kicked off the ‘80s Indie Comic Boom. This was tripled down as I desperately wanted to get off the farm in a place that was in the early stages of becoming blood red Trumpland and stop missing out on those hoppin’ ‘80s Alt Comics and Alt Rock scenes. I would have thought I was living like a frugal prince if I could have cranked out a Captain Saucer Indie for $10,000 year from a crappy little apartment in one of those scenes. Through the “anybody can get published!” Indie Boom, this adopted kid with monster rejection issues got endless cliquey toxic gatekeeping, which doesn’t make them better. There was a lot of bigotry from neuro-typical white collar, suburban kiddies of fandom and prodom, who all went to good schools and this autistic farm boy who went to a failing rural school. I’m going to have rejection and low self-esteem issues to the grave because next to nobody thought that I was worth the lifted finger, pulled string, or helping hand.
Flexia and friends in the second attempted sketch for the picture on top.
Here is some meta with the second preliminary of this drawing inside this drawing with Flexia Bast in the middle. Flexia is my favorite character. She started out as a side character in Captain Saucer that came to almost dominate the comic. Being a tall muscle-bound galactic level beauty with teh bewbs tends to do that. As the original Captain Saucer got rebooted into the original InterStellar OverDrive, which was an ensemble with no main character let her dominate a little more.
Flexia putting the big in the Big ‘80s!
Here’s more meta with a retro New Wave pinup of Flexia. This is based on the earlier ‘80s version that was more feral and feline, before she was retconned into a something more virtuous, the CSO of L4 with a MBA from UNO, and a mother of three, including half-sisters Revellia and Celandine.
Elvis has left the building but is peeping through the window.
Ulviox “Elvis” 10G-Q4: A little green man from across the ‘80s Captain Saucer and the InterStellar OverDrive continuities. He’s sort of an exaggerated nerd, being ludicrously smart but having a really juvenile personality. He was played way too doofy in the ‘80s Captain Saucers. I wish that I had the Windows 95 era nerd stereotype to play with back then.
If it has chrome and tail fins, you know it’s retro!
The original InterStellar OverDrive reboot of Captain Saucer was the result of picking up the pieces after a rough year and a half in the already rough decade of the ‘80s. This was a year and a half featuring psychiatric malpractice including trying to thorazine somebody unto being another dumb ‘n’ numb normal, all three of my remaining grandparents dying, and an emotionally brutal trip to and around the ’87 Chicago Con and back. The proboys at the con, or the fanboys that I was giving a ride to, being endlessly mean to somebody until they’re very upset is in no way antisocial, especially if you’re slopping over with early Boomer proboy privilege or nodding along with the Des Moines fanboy clique or the fanboy clique is nodding along with you. But getting upset that it ran too long and heavy is most certainly crimes against humanity level antisocial.
Other fallout from the rough year and a half and the con was trying for another direction and signing up for electronics school. I had gotten cheated on car stereo repair. And you can count on parents who grew up before Rock & Roll to add insult to injury. “Boy, you’re spending money like a drunken sailor!” No, Dad, I just want something nice that works without spending any money, but everything is turning to shit around me! I wondered why I could fix the car, but not the stereo? I went to IWCC to get an associates in electronics to fix the stereo and a whole lot else. While I was there, an early version of InterStellar OverDrive was an A+ college journalism project on the side.
This reboot and the various InterStellar OverDrive reboots that followed ones were what is called “Cerebus Syndrone”, making things less of a parody. The space heroics and Twinkles were phased out little by little. The ‘verse became an ensemble. New characters and alien races were created. I started branching out to into Steampunk and Cassette Futurism before they had names. The Cseworld romp and what followed showed had two flavors of Steampunk: the Victorian with some pseudo-Eastern Leians and the Art Nouveau Cses. I had three flavors of Dieselpunk with the Art Deco Hampions and the Bauhaus Claireans and mock Eastern Bloc Dragonmen. I had my Atompunk with the Googie earthlings and the 1101 robot race. Cassette Futurism with Qwertyuiop’s digs and elsewhere. This is something that nobody else has yet to fiddle with years afterwards and was squandered because the fanboys to retailers couldn’t or wouldn’t get the joke.
Cses, Claireans, Dragonmen, Hampions, Leians, and whatever Qwertyuiop and Shalf are….
Still a respectable piece of Atompunk before there was Atompunk and still is over three decades later.
InterStellar OverDrive is my most favorite pet and passion project but it’s also the one that caused the most frustrations. It came out of picking up the pieces from rough times and that rough comics con. There’s kicking an adopted kid’s abandonment and betrayal issues. A hypocrite hippie and self-anointed king of Small Press Comics dumping on me for not having anything he wants while cribbing my key-lined xerography claiming it’s his innovation, and putting me through the first of two of what Dr. Olweus calls mobbings, that’s when a socially manipulative flavor of bully turns as many people as possible against somebody, in fandom. He thought that he could wholesale wrong somebody and be right because the United Fanboy Organization in-clique was nodding in agreement and he had an octuple dose of early Boomer arrogance. There’s losing money trying to crack the Direct Market because I was against the schadenfreude and other toxic gatekeeping from the Des Moines fanboys to Capital City Distributors. A lost revival with Rip-Off Press that ended with the artist blowing two chances in getting the art done in time for Kath Todd at Rip Off Press and then putting me through the second mobbing because obviously I was the one letting him down. Of course, the clique nodded along with agreement. This hurt enough that I ended up dropping out of regional fandom for the good part of two decades. The second Rip Off Press revival that had great potential but was the first Rip Off Press comic cancelled before going to press by the Heroes World crunch. An A-Bomb Comics revival, with early Steampunk down to the brass doodad laptops, that was slated for Issue #18 got canned when series was cancelled at #16. Getting the short end of cyber bullying, before it had a name, in regional fandom, which of course sided with him, and toxic gatekeeping with the Usenet fanboys. The last three were big reasons that I chased the model rocket thing until my chronic bad luck bit that.
You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse….
This was a photo of the Westinghouse Nuclear Support Division training center in Waltz Mill, Pennsylvania pasted in as an in-joke and a DYN, “did you notice?” I was a bowl jumper for the Westinghouse Nuclear Support Division back in the day. If I were anymore authentically Atompunk, I would glow in the dark!
Al T. Tude flying through a bad pun.
While InterStellar OverDrive floundered in the Indie Glut, I found a little break enough to keep hope and aspiration alive elsewhere with Gary Hindrichson and his Timber Ridge Outdoor and Magazine. I did illustrations, aped some of the Ed Bennedict and Iwao Takamoto who set the house style of the Hanna-Barbera reruns of my formative childhood for the cartoons, and even typeset on my little MacPlus for extra dollars. Some of the characters that were co-created by Gary and me were Al T. Tude, chubby flight instructor and his skinny hopeless student Ickys, short for Icarus. Some of these cartoons were clipped and used without permission for one of Godberson’s Flying 1/5 Airshow Flyers back when those were in Ida Grove, Iowa.
Based on an early sketch that got me the job.
Timber Ridge had a duck mascot and motif. After all the region was duck hunting central, after it was pheasant hunting central, after it was deer hunting central, and after it was coyote hunting central….
Timber Ridge magazine was supposed to soar after advertising opened up from the casinos, but that didn’t happen because the Sioux City paper had locked those out with exclusivity discounts. Gary was noble enough to pay me for the last set of cartoons, illos, and typesetting for the last issue the never went to print. This means a lot to me, especially in contrast of the shoot the shaggy dog story that was the lost revival of InterStellar OverDrive that went on around the same time. Ex-partner would not or could not get the art finished for Kath Todd at Rip Off Press in time. This was twice over, because she gave him a second chance which he flubbed. He then punished me through a mobbing in regional fandom that hurt bad enough that I dropped out of fandom for most of the next two decades.
Ironically, I currently don’t have a business card.
I spent the middle half of the ‘90s pasting up the lion’s share of business cards printed at the Omaha franchise of AWT which did a lion’s share of thermographed (raised textured ink) printing in town. I went from a newbie to supposedly one of the best paste-up guys in town back in the wax and rubber cement days. It’s during this time that I did the second Rip Off Press revival of InterStellar OverDrive. That became collateral damage from the Heroes World crash. I got back into model rocketry, and was the first person from my hometown to put up a website.
Phoney.
Putting up that website got me a job in the old hometown phone company pretending to be a computer and Internet expert. This was a refreshing break after an InterStellar OverDrive variant for A-Bomb comic was canceled and being cyber bullied in fandom. What was promised as career for the rest of my life was downsized to oblivion 18 months later when the phone company was bought out by a bigger regional telecom.
The crank phone has to do with that hometown phone company being a crank phone holdout until it was an embarrassment by the time men were walking on the moon. They made the leapfrog upgrade to touchtone. Shortly after, I got some junk crank phones to play with. I ripped through them dissecting them in name of science or building Steam AM Top 40 toys or other such imaginary devices out of the parts. I wish that I had saved a few whole phones. The crank phone also represents the insult to injury of how much the phone and Internet service went downhill after that regional company bought them.
Swinger.
The Swinger is a swing-wing rocket glider from the Holverson Designs days. I had a model rocket company for a while after getting a bit too much toxic gatekeeping and other cliquishness from fandom. A striking example was being dumped on by the Usenet fanboys versus being treated like a prince at NARAM for some rocket prototypes. That had me deciding to chase the rocket thing as far as I could as an alternative. At this time Estes was going through a dork age, going from a scientific hobby to a maker of disposable toys. A lot of little companies popped up to fill the vacuum. I even had a former Estes employee who was impressed enough to help.
The Zoomie, named after a fictitious radioactive mutant bitey bug.
I got five model rocket kits on the selves and pegs, and had eight more on deck.I did well enough with Holverson Designs to get the wrong type of attention. I partnered up with a maker of flying toys who actually then was doing well making flying toy planes. This became Fun Rockets. This was bad luck disguised as as good luck. I thought that I finally had my belated big break. A little while in, alpha partner decided to make these bastardized cheesy foam ready to fly versions of the kits. I knew that this was antithetical to what they’re about and wrong for the market, but I couldn’t talk him out of it. These flailed away in the market, going into the Dot Com Bust sagging economy and those planes flying into the buildings making things worse. Ol’ partner talked about finding a balsa supplier and bringing back the kits, before walking off into the vapors. That ended me chasing that dream and in the hole.
My friend from Estes got divorced. He went away and never came back. Twice over because he died last year before we could get back together and fly.
Takin’ a ride on heavy metal….
The Tau Ceti style standard austerity heavy freight saucer is based on another hypnogogic vision. It settled into being associated with the Leians, Revellia’s and Flexia’s race. I like that it looked a little bit sinister. As the Leian culture got fleshed out from skin-deep ‘80s Metal-headed to ‘90s proto-Steampunk, the saucers took on more colorful florid paint jobs, with the nickname of Iron Butterfly.
The initial sketch for the picture on top with a grown up and grown out Celandine.
I was going a little meta with the first preliminary of this drawing with an adult Celandine inside this drawing. I didn’t use that version mainly because I didn’t want two characters who are both aged and fattened up into their 30s. Plus her expression looked mean enough that it comes across bullying, compared to Revellia just being an overgrown obnoxious teenager.
In continuity, Cealie is the Americanized five-year-old daughter of Flexia. She wants to grow up to be big and strong like mama. She’s the illegitimate daughter of an emperor of a terra-formed moon. She has the token royal title that politely translates as a “reserve princess”. This half blue-blooded girl has seen the princess stuff in the dollar stores, but naturally wants to be a sheriff since it was next to the cowboy and cop stuff. “Sheriffs are like princesses because they have ponies that they can ride any time they want to! And they’re better than princesses ‘cause they’re big tough cowboys who can arrest and shoot people!”
The fattened up Sissie and Celandine might symbolize my Mel Allen Sink phase, which is the original name on the pre-adoption birth certificate, with “Phat Grrl” art of the early and middle aughties. I was blowing off steam doing something off-kilter and nutty while coming to terms with a lot of stuff: 9/11, the celebrity deaths of George Harrison and Chuck Jones, my big belated break of Fun Rockets crashing and burning, and the dead-end of my Compaq job.
Celandine at her canon age and size.
The Compaq job had hopes and ended with disillusionment. Despite that I was mainly a Mac fanboi when Apple wasn’t out of the beleaguered orchard yet and I was ready and willing to learn Wintels down to the registry and rivets to get ahead. Instead, I was dead ended at the end of a production spar making custom corporate computers for business and government. Management made promises to us workers that if we went without raises and benefits and that with hard work and beating quotas now would mean that things would get better after the Hewlett-Packard buyout. This went on for three stages and three years of the merger. In the end, the hard work and beating the quotas were rewarded with store bought cookies and off-brand soda pop in cognitive dissonant meetings trying to turn a plant closing into a feel good dealie. “We’re bringing this ship to the dock!” Us wise guys were saying “We’re bringing this ship to the iceberg!” referencing a certain then recent historical blockbuster as bloated, creaky, and leaky as its namesake….
The XT stands for extra terrific!
The Captain Saucer reboot had the angsty and dystopian stuff stripped out from the original and was pushed in the direction of denser and wackier with a mostly new cast. Although the edge and orneriness are still there with an universe full of not too bright comedic sociopaths. The main saucer from the Captain Saucer reboot is the One-Ninety XT. The name is an in-joke on Grandpa Skow’s Allis Chalmers dealership. I have a complete unpublished issue that’s been sitting in the can since the middle ‘00s. I do think that Captain Saucer had stunted potential since it was bifurcated into both a sprawling reboot and InterStellar OverDrive.
John Harrison contemplating the longitude and circumference of those things….
John Harrison, or Struldburg if you like. Struldburg was Captain Saucer’s senile boss as a loose Reagan surrogate in the ‘80s Captain Saucer. Since lampooning the senile is now concidered punching down that doesn’t fly anymore in the 21stcentury, the character became the younger, more officious Harrison in the Captain Saucer reboot.
Now if you’re wondering about the names. Struldburg was a reference to the Struldbruggs in the later “Laputa” chapter of Gulliver’s Travels. Most people don’t sail the turgid purple seas past the cute little Lilliputians. The name John Harrison was cribbed well before the Abrams’ Trek, getting in-joke longitude playing off the rebooted Captain Saucer being named Nevil Maskelyne.
Venus and Mars are alright tonight….
Sci Fi Guy! was my other big project that I had high hopes for, but it also didn’t go anywhere. The idea behind the webcomic was a mash-up of a slice of ‘70s life and half remembered ‘70s fan comics. Merv, a ‘70s nerd and, Maggie, his tomboy best friend, meet up with Tom, a dimension hopping catgirl, and Xerkibub, a little green man with a hot-wired spaceship, to go on time and planet hopping romps. It was the most fan friendly thing I ever did and was conveniently ignored.
When I was putting together Sci Fi Guy!, I wanted a spaceship that looked something funky, clunky, and ‘70s fannish. Then I realized that I already had one of those from my teen days. It was recycled as the “Zed” spaceship. The old Centuri X-24 Bug heavily inspired it. It’s also inspired my beloved ’80 Pinto, stalwart if cut corner transportation, that I drove from new until it was sold off in ’92 as if it was a spaceship that could talk. Which is why Zed even has a Dan DeCarlo inspired holographic avatar.
How’s it shakin’, Toots?
Xerkibub J. Space is another variation on a little green man, this time a rowdy one inspired by Terry Toons’ Astronaut.
Steam is a gas!
If Sci Fi Guy! had been successful, there could have been a side story spun off as a “Summer Super Special” featuring Merv’s country cousin, Junior. This was based on an early zeroth draft in my head of Sci-Fi Guy! that originally wasn’t used because the rural setting would have made it just enough darker dealing with being an isolated and alone outcast. The Super Special would have flown with the Steam AM Top 40 groove of proto-Steampunk in the ‘70s by somebody who went there. Junior goes there with a romp to Brassellia, which even has steam-powered flying saucers.
Revellia rockin’ and rebelling in her thrift store auntie fedora.
Revellia R. Bast is one of the main characters in a hypothetical InterStellar OverDrive revival. She is retconned as Flexia Bast’s oldest daughter when Flexia was retconned as a single mother of three. She’s an Americanized immigrant kid from out Tau Ceti way and considers herself a teenage tomboy and a Rockabilly rebel. She’ll even tell you that. This is along with informing you that she’s an all-natural 46JJ and a natural-born polydactyl…
Despite being the only one wearing a Feirds t-shirt, Revellia is not a Feird. She’s not even related. She’s not even the same species. Nor even born on the same planet. But she’s enough of an oddball to be a spiritual decedent.
Of course, Polydactbilly gets played on a non-Western octave at ear bleed volume.
Zewellia the Accordion and Toobie the Amp are a Punk, or at least College Radio or ‘80s Alt Rock, counterpoint to the Pop Music represented by the Panapet. Or in Revvie’s case, at least Rockabilly rebellion, circa ’87, that’s 2087, played on the Tau Ceti well-tempered quartertone scale. Or you could call it Polydactbilly, playing those extra notes with extra fingers, echoing my Autistic art with its quirky retros. “Not just everybody can play Polydactbilly!”
“Being a peepin’ tom is illegal, ain’t it? See I’m evil after all!””
Zizzle is one of the main four characters from Malevoland, a roommate comedy about orcs and ogres in an evil empire. The orcs and ogres are the villain protagonists who are rotten at being rotten while the elves and humans are the hero antagonists who are bad at being good. And it’s probably a belated ‘80s style S&S or D&D parody….
Nuclear grade cruisin’ style…..
While I still daydream of a Comics career, I feel that sort of thing is for ambitious people in their 20s and 30s. At 62, I don’t want to knock myself out that badly anymore. Comics, because some people didn’t like that a “retarded farm boy” was smart enough to do Atompunk and the like before its time, and the rest of the private sector with its Karens in HR who didn’t like that a “retarded farmboy” was smart enough to ace their aptitude tests, lost a potentially good man to the public sector. And all I had to dominate an “unpassable” electronics aptitude test that would make them wilt to do it. After being gaslighted for years as “Zero the retarded farm boy ain’t got no real talent”, I’ve held that job for 18years, bought an old house and new car, and even my dream machine of an Atompunk in real life “rocket car”. This old boy is going to shift his bucket list priorities to working on the Studebakers and flying RC after the New Year, while keeping on drawing some odds and ends. I hope to someday wrap up my Comics career that wasn’t with a bow and call it Tube Punk. I’m looking forward to retirement, but not counting on getting it because I don’t trust the economy, politicians, fate and circumstance.
More of what rattles around in that head. There’s almost an A.I. Art type feel going on here starting with those pointing hands….
The layout of this page is roughly based on back cover and catalog and promotional art that I did back in the Small Press Comics ‘80s. I even did webpage layouts based on this back when I knew some half-clever amateur level html. Actually this page would format better like that in html instead of Kos diary formatting. Maybe you could party like it’s 1995 and view it at a Performa-like 600 or 800 pixels wide and the little illos will fall where they’re supposed to be….
Of course, it’s all long gone and no longer availabe.
This diary was supposed to come out much earlier. I started writing it in the spring with hopes of getting it published in the middle of August, which was around the time I originally created The Feirds. Then I get sidetracked by doing model rocket stuff to get ready to go to NARAM. I get back and write about missing Dad because that was more important to me. I lose momentum with a summertime cold. I get dragged down by rough workdays and weeks. I finally put my finger on the trauma, which puts this back a few weeks while I try to come to terms. I’m now busting my buns trying to push this out while there’s still some anniversary year left.
Hopefully, this is the last of “the enough about me and my comics, let’s talk about me and my comics!” diaries for a while. I toyed with bailing on writing this one because it’s flogging that theme over again and a probably being a little redundant covering some of the same ground as the Heroes World and Big Six-Oh diaries. Plus, it’s probably flirting with a bad case of TL;DR.
Future diaries that I can see happening are a post-post-mortem on my old Facebook profile and a couple of diaries about model rockets. I haven’t written about my old FB profile since the first three diaries because of insult to injury and burn out on not getting it fixed and finally deleted. The hacker did get it going as a zombie profile before it apparently got locked and hidden again. The first planned rocket diary would be about the 50th anniversary of first getting in the hobby in ’73 and doing it in the middle ‘70s. The planned second diary would be about 30 years after, getting “born again” in rocketry in 1994 and onwards through the failed company and losing my best rocket buddy. I sent him a package of 3D printed model rocket parts, some new designs and some recreations of ‘70s stuff, that was going to delight him, but it got returned with him never seeing it.
“You don’t insult a girl for her size if you’re a BBW, ‘cause that’s disingenuous… And you don’t insult a girl for having Atlas shoulders and arms ‘cause that just ain’t smart… And you especially don’t never, never, never insult poor old ‘Auntie Fedora’! You might hurt the poor little thing’s feelings….
