Drug Abuse Is Fun-damental!
Got a few cool things done since last night.
Last night I uploaded issues 2 through 6 of Drug Abuse Is Fun! to Webcomics Nation. Starting tomorrow morning it will be appearing on WCN every weekday, beginning with issue 2 and continuing until all 17 issues have been posted.
Drug Abuse Is Fun! was the very first minicomic I ever did, beginning in late 1994. I had lived in Paris from 1989 to 1991, where I met Stephen Greenwood-Hyde (then just Stephen Hyde) and we created Progressions. I'd been back in Austin a few years and had just moved out on my own, to my first apartment, a bland little studio on North Lamar. I wanted to draw comics, but Stephen lived in England and we didn't figure we could collaborate overseas. I think at the time we were still holding out some kind of hope that he's find a way to move over here and we could be in the same town. Or maybe I was, I dunno.
Autobiographical comics were all the rage in 1993 and '94, with Joe Matt, Seth, Chester Brown getting big, as well as R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar and Eddie Campbell creating masterpieces in the genre. I didn't have any other ideas so I decided to write about my life, and Drug Abuse Is Fun! was born.
It started off innocuous and fairly banal. I had met Jason Smith, a talented local guitar player, in a singing class at Austin Community College. We got along great and started going out to clubs. Jason was a lot more outgoing than I was, very confident and sure of himself. I had started drawing comics about our "adventures", hanging out with friends and going out, when we decided to take a trip to Big Bend State Park, just Jason and me. And that was going to be it for my friendship with Jason.
It's pretty confusing to me even now, why I behaved the way I did. I drew the Big Bend events into four issues of Drug Abuse, issues 3 to 6. Scanning those issues in last night put me into kind of a funk, not only because I miss Jason as a friend (though it's been thirteen years since our last contact), but because I still see myself making a lot of the same mistakes I detailed in these stories. I don't know if I didn't learn from them, or what. I hope I did, but to what extent I'm not sure.
Part of the main contention of all these earlier stories is that I find myself connecting with only one or two people at a time, and beyond that I find it tough to make friends. I'd love to be gregarious and have scores of connections, people to spend time with and hang out, get caught up on their lives, and so on. At any given time I have a few great friends for which I am extremely grateful. But it feels like I'm missing something, not the least of which is that it'd be nice to meet a girl and go on a date once in a while.
So overall it's a sobering experience to read through these old comics and see what ways I've changed and what ways I haven't. It's also a great experience to finally get to post these old comics on the web, since they haven't been seen by pretty much anybody in more than a decade. With 17 issues of Drug Abuse to publish, starting tomorrow, I will have a page of comics on the web every day for at least a year. Not to mention Chastity Towers and any other comics projects that take off on the meantime. That's a pretty cool feeling!
It's been a while since I was able to devote myself to comics wholeheartedly and I have been missing it desperately.
Jeff
Last night I uploaded issues 2 through 6 of Drug Abuse Is Fun! to Webcomics Nation. Starting tomorrow morning it will be appearing on WCN every weekday, beginning with issue 2 and continuing until all 17 issues have been posted.
Drug Abuse Is Fun! was the very first minicomic I ever did, beginning in late 1994. I had lived in Paris from 1989 to 1991, where I met Stephen Greenwood-Hyde (then just Stephen Hyde) and we created Progressions. I'd been back in Austin a few years and had just moved out on my own, to my first apartment, a bland little studio on North Lamar. I wanted to draw comics, but Stephen lived in England and we didn't figure we could collaborate overseas. I think at the time we were still holding out some kind of hope that he's find a way to move over here and we could be in the same town. Or maybe I was, I dunno.
Autobiographical comics were all the rage in 1993 and '94, with Joe Matt, Seth, Chester Brown getting big, as well as R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar and Eddie Campbell creating masterpieces in the genre. I didn't have any other ideas so I decided to write about my life, and Drug Abuse Is Fun! was born.
It started off innocuous and fairly banal. I had met Jason Smith, a talented local guitar player, in a singing class at Austin Community College. We got along great and started going out to clubs. Jason was a lot more outgoing than I was, very confident and sure of himself. I had started drawing comics about our "adventures", hanging out with friends and going out, when we decided to take a trip to Big Bend State Park, just Jason and me. And that was going to be it for my friendship with Jason.
It's pretty confusing to me even now, why I behaved the way I did. I drew the Big Bend events into four issues of Drug Abuse, issues 3 to 6. Scanning those issues in last night put me into kind of a funk, not only because I miss Jason as a friend (though it's been thirteen years since our last contact), but because I still see myself making a lot of the same mistakes I detailed in these stories. I don't know if I didn't learn from them, or what. I hope I did, but to what extent I'm not sure.
Part of the main contention of all these earlier stories is that I find myself connecting with only one or two people at a time, and beyond that I find it tough to make friends. I'd love to be gregarious and have scores of connections, people to spend time with and hang out, get caught up on their lives, and so on. At any given time I have a few great friends for which I am extremely grateful. But it feels like I'm missing something, not the least of which is that it'd be nice to meet a girl and go on a date once in a while.
So overall it's a sobering experience to read through these old comics and see what ways I've changed and what ways I haven't. It's also a great experience to finally get to post these old comics on the web, since they haven't been seen by pretty much anybody in more than a decade. With 17 issues of Drug Abuse to publish, starting tomorrow, I will have a page of comics on the web every day for at least a year. Not to mention Chastity Towers and any other comics projects that take off on the meantime. That's a pretty cool feeling!
It's been a while since I was able to devote myself to comics wholeheartedly and I have been missing it desperately.
Jeff
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