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2nd
June
04
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Can there be any
comics fans who haven't at some stage wanted to create their own comics?
I know I have. I invented my own superhero team back when I
was barely knee-high to a Dennis Hopper; about eight years old. I can't remember
that much about them now, but I do recall that they were my own take on The Avengers.
Except they were Irish. That's because I, your friendless neighbourhood Sprout,
come from the Emerald Isle (though thankfully not the one that Garth Ennis so
delightfully portrayed in 2000 AD some years back).
 Let's
see... There was The Image, who had the power to manipulate light. That meant
that he could generate holograms, fire lasers from his eyes, turn himself invisible,
and see in the dark (useful one, that). It never occurred to me that an invisible
superhero would also be blind (because the light would pass through his eyes),
but then it also never occurred to Stan Lee when he created The Fantastic Four,
so I was in good company there.
There was also The Skeleton. I can't remember what powers he
had (the ability to star in Ray Harryhausen movies, perhaps?), but I do recall
that his real name was Frank Skelton. Not, I grant you, the most opaque of secret
identities.
I can also remember one - who may not have been in my Irish
version of the Avengers; he might have been invented separately - whose name was
Super Trooper. He was a soldier with lots and lots of weapons. He was completely
unkillable, but he didn't feature in many of my home-made comics because he took
too long to draw. I guess I should have had him, say, stripped to the waist and
with only one gun. Yeah! That would have worked. Also, he should have been blue.
And there was also The Whizzer. He could run very fast when
he swallowed his speed pills. Oh yes. But remember; I was eight. I'd never heard
of amphetamines. No, The Whizzer popped pills because that's what Giant Man used
to do. Remember that? "Great Scott! They're headed right for me! I've only got
a split second to take one of my shrinking pills which I keep here in my belt
pouch with the fiddly clasp! Ooops, dropped it! Darn these loose-fitting gloves!
There! Got one! Now I'll swallow the pill and shrink as such a great speed that
my enemies will think that I've become invisible!" "What the-!? He's disappeared!"
"Perhaps he's turned invisible?" "Don't be stupid: if he was invisible, he'd be
blind, wouldn't he?"
The Whizzer was very much my own invention... But annoyingly,
shortly after his debut, there was an issue of The Avengers that featured
a super-fast baddie called The Whizzer. He also popped speed pills. Damn it! That's
been happening to me all my life: I come up with a great idea, then someone steals
it and goes back in time. It also happened with my great future-cop, Barrister
Fear.
Anyway, about a year or so after that, my friends and I decided
that we really, really had to make our own comic. None of us could draw particularly
well, but what we lacked in skill we made up in self-delusion. We were an enthusiastic
if talentless creative team: There was me, Brian, Robert and Shane, and we set
about the task with gusto. Sadly, Gusto left the team early on and we were forced
to struggle ahead without him.
We knew that duplicating the comics would be a problem. Photocopiers
were around at the time but we knew no one who had access to one. No, the only
chance we had was the school's stencil thingy. Older readers will know the kind
of device I mean: a big rotating drum that operated under pupil-power and produced
poor-quality copies in purple ink that smelled strongly of what we liked to believe
was alcohol - whenever the teacher handed out something we'd all sniff the pages
and persuade ourselves that we were getting drunk.
Unfortunately, Young Sprout and his pals were refused access
to this jealously and zealously-guarded device, so we decided that we'd concentrate
on making just one copy and then when everyone saw how brilliant it was they'd
be falling over themselves in order to provide financial support.
As is the way with nine-year-olds, we didn't actually get anywhere.
Despite many passionate beginnings, none of our comics ever made it past the first
page. Which is probably just as well, because they were crap; we made the mistake
of starting to write and draw them before we knew what they were supposed to be
about (a mistake that I find is also very common to a lot of grown-up writers).
 Then
Brian got himself a printing kit for his birthday. This was basically an ink-pad,
a frame thingy, and lots of letters and numbers which you were supposed to fit
into the frame thingy. It was sort of "My First Typesetting Kit". You set out
the text, inked it up, and stamped it down on the page: hey presto, printing!
Armed with this remarkable piece of high-technology, we started a new comic from
scratch. This one wasn't going to be about superheroes or spacemen: No, we'd examined
the market and come to the conclusion that what was really selling was The
Beano and its contemporaries (Whoopee, Shiver and Shake, Whizzer
and Chips, Assault and Battery - well, maybe not that last one).
We decided that a kids' comic based around nursery rhymes would
be the best option: It was to be called Humpty!. It would have a colour
cover - thanks to my little sister's coloured pencils - and to make things easier,
there would be no speech balloons; like a few other kids' comics of the time,
it would have the text underneath the pictures. A lot simpler to do, plus it meant
that we could utilise the printing kit.
So we drew the first page - leaving lots of space for the text
- then Brian set up the printing frame thingie. He loaded it with the right characters,
inked it up, stamped it down on the page... And all the letters were now the wrong
way around. We'd forgotten that the printing is a mirror-image of the plate, and
none of us had had the intelligence to test it out on a spare page first.
That meant we had to draw the first page again. When this was
done, Brian emptied the frame and re-loaded it, inked it up, stamped it down on
the newly-drawn page... And it was back-to-front again.
Thus ends the saga of Humpty!, the greatest kids' comic
that never was.
Now, let's roll on to 1979, or thereabouts... Sprout is in his
early teens, and decides that he wants to create a Judge Dredd fanzine.
The main feature would be a "novelisation" of the first Judge Death story, encompassing
lots of the Dredd back-story to flesh it out. This fanzine fared no better than
any of the comics; I got about a page and a half into the Death story and gave
up. This was mainly because I was hammering it out on my mother's ancient manual
portable typewriter and the noise was driving everyone in the house crazy. Well,
crazier.
 But
if I'd kept at it, I might have produced something that looked half-way decent,
because, while desk-top publishing was still a long way off, there was something
available that was just as good: Letraset! Yes, for a mere five weeks' pocket
money, it was possible to buy a couple of sheets of molecule-thin plasticy stuff
that came in a wide variety of illegible typefaces that read, and I quote, "aaaaaabbbbbbccccc"
etc. To use this stuff, you placed the sheet over the desired location and scribbled
on the topside using a soft pencil. This had the effect of loosening the letter
from the sheet and causing it to stick to the page. If you were very, very lucky,
it would work. Most of the time the letters tore, and the rest of the time they
went on wonky and you had to start again.
There was another lettering tool around at the time, similar
to the little sheet of decals we used to get with Airfix kits. The trick with
this stuff was to cut out the required letters, soak them in a saucer of water
for a couple of minutes, then carefully - using a tweezers and a simple household
electron microscope - peel off the backing paper and stick the letters onto a
sheet of paper. A success it was not. Most of the time the letters tore, and the
rest of the time they went on wonky you had to start again.
After spending far too much time just attempting to get the
first page of the fanzine done, and having realised that I still didn't have an
easy way to make copies, I gave up.
I made a few more half-hearted and half-arsed attempts at creating
my own comics in the subsequent years, but all came to nought.
But if any young
people are reading this; don't despair! Just because all of my attempts failed,
that doesn't mean that yours won't be brilliant. And even if yours do fail, rest
assured that one day - in the far future - you might be able to use your experiences
to quickly churn out a smarmy article when you're up against a deadline.
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