Worlds
Since before I knew I would become consumed with creating worlds, I plied my trade. In first grade, a close friend and I would create intricate companies. We would build structures, too, making our own cities. When he would come to spend the night, we would sit up as late as allowed and talk through what we were going to make next. Perhaps it would be a production company. We had no idea what a production company was, but we were vaguely aware of what the word production meant and felt the two of us made a company. We would not have been able to put any of this into words, but upon retrospect, I believe this was our overarching goal. Looking back, it is an audacious way for two first graders to spend their sleep overs; we never played kick the can or cops and robbers. I would play those games throughout my childhood, but not with this friend. We played mogul and world builder. We were JRR Tolkien and George Lucas and Ursula K LeGuin before we knew who any of those people were, let alone barely having the ability to read.
We would partner on any number of other things throughout our early elementary school days, and I believe those early creations paved the way for my creation, along with other friends, of a local remake of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and later, Fargo (Now, as of this writing — aren’t all of these words of this writing — probably my favorite movie). I would create my own production companies, multiple of them, and like a middle school crush, I would write their names on my folders while willfully tuning out the school lecture. I don’t recall all their names, but one I do recall is jeremiah productions. Notice the lack of capital letters? That was by design, though I doubt I could tell you why that was then; were I forced to explain it now, I guess I went that route because it was different, maybe even subversive, in a way. I was creating something that was my own and being diminunative about even that. Here’s a great big production company, but we won’t get too big for our britches: We’ll keep all the letters lower case. What did jeremiah productions produce? Nothing, but it was fun to dream that perhaps it would one day. At the very least, it gave me something to scribble on my blue and green folders. I don’t recall anyone ever asking me what the hell jeremiah productions was, but I like to think I would have answered as honestly as I could: It’s one of my production companies. That cannot have garnered much more of an astonished reaction than when I asked my best friend to play Divorce in fourth grade, each of us playing the lawyer for one of the aggrieved spouses. My best friend, one of the most creative people I have ever met, just stared at me with a look like: Why would I waste my time on that? Fair question; but I was trying to create a replication of the world I knew at that time, and maybe, just maybe, I was trying to be subversive about that as well. But likely not. As much as I’d like to tell you that I was satirizing the dissolution of marriage in the fourth grade, the more likely and honest answer is: I was afraid and in pain, and without being able to describe it as such, I was probably trying to mock that pain and fear; or at least cast its darkness in an absurd light. It remains the key way I deal with the grisly life challenges to this day.
During my elementary and junior high days, I could be heard from time to time complaining about how bored I was. I never had much interest in food other than it’s base purpose, so not even learning to cook enticed me. Instead, when I had a babysitter who tired of making my food, I would simply take a single piece of sliced deli turkey from the fridge, place it on a paper plate, and eat it with a fork. I mean a thin piece of turkey, so thin it was almost translucent. Trust me, if I had my druthers (and knew what a druther was), I would never have even prepared food in the first place (though that piece of turkey was hardly “prepared”). As I say more often than I’m likely aware, I only eat because my body demands it. My mother used to always tell me I was never going to be fat because I always stopped eating when I was full. I stopped eating because it was boring; because it was not creation; because it was not moving me forward. I’d like to think that was really the root of my anti-foodie stance, but really, it’s much more likely a laziness around mastering the particularities of the culinary arts. All I’m saying is — or trying to say, at least — is that when I grew bored on long, languid days without school, whether it be summer or a weekend or an extended break — I would not just walk into the kitchen and grab a snack. More often than not, I wouldn’t move much, except to raise the remote and switch the channel to TBS to catch another rerun of Three’s Company or Who’s the Boss or, far after I had aged out of the ideal demographic, Saved by the Bell. After placing the remote on the coffee table, I would lean back and with mouth agape, watch the episodes. I rarely remember laughing.
I do recall being taken in by the entire world of sitcoms and how they shared numerous similarities: the ad breaks, the same type of jokes, the lovable characters, and most of all, the intricate sets. I didn’t even know they were called sets (ironic, perhaps, for someone who once thought he would give his life to theater) but I knew I loved the world building and creation. Before I knew it, I would lean forward from the couch and reach into the huge wicker basket full of odds and ends that sat under the corner table sporting the lamp, and dig out a notepad. If I grabbed one that was “college ruled”, I always felt a tad more distinguished, or at least a bit more mature. Whatever the type of paper, I would begin creating my own version of sitcom sets and characters. I don’t recall finishing any full episodes, but I certainly started a good deal of them. I didn’t know what an A Block or B Block was, but I knew that I had drawn an intricate place for my two dimensional characters to live, and I loved living in that world, even if it was for only a couple script pages, or just one sketch of the main setting. Who needs food when there are worlds to be created?
Around the same time I was creating my own sitcoms, I had fallen for Calvin and Hobbes. Even now at the beginning of my forties, those comic strips represent some of the best art and writing — of any medium — I have come across. While it’s important to tell you that I first found the precocious six year old and his tiger shortly after my parents’ divorce, and that timing has something to do with the way it sunk its profound hooks in me, I believe I would still love Calvin and Hobbes almost as much as I do now. However, timing is everything, or so I’m told, and it was the right time in my life when I was in a B Dalton Bookseller in the Market Place Mall in the big town near my hometown and I came across Revenge of the Babysat. I can close my eyes and picture the cover; Calvin and Hobbes sneaking down the stairs, coming upon a doorway where an unsuspecting blonde high school girl (the babysitter) waits, blissfully unaware of the cold dish she is about to be served. The title letters were large and darker purple block; the rest of the main color was an extremely light purple. At the bottom it said “A Calvin and Hobbes Collection by Bill Watterson”. I read that multiple times upon first picking the book up. It was easy enough to figure out who Calvin and Hobbes were — though I wasn’t sure which one was the human and which the tiger — but what was being collected here? At this time in my life, I don’t recall ever reading the comics in the newspapers. I never really picked up the newspaper at all. So, when I opened Revenge of the Babysat, I flipped through it and saw multiple comic strips and deduced it must mean this Bill Watterson had collected his best drawings. I never thought — at least I don’t recall thinking at the time — that this could be a collection of daily comic strips.
Perhaps something like this should have been more obvious to me, but for whatever reason it was not. I brought that book back to my father’s one bedroom apartment and became lost in the world. I loved the way the drawings looked. They didn’t look like the life I had lived up to that point. The tables were not at right angles; Calvin’s hair always stayed the same shape sticking up; the tiger was living and talking, at least when he was around Calvin; and how Charles Shultz put it on his introduction to an earlier treasury, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, the feet looked like dinner rolls. (Speaking of understanding the ins and outs of worlds, I was also flummoxed by this term “Treasury” when I first came across The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, but as Paul and the lads have been instructing me for years we’ll let that be, for now).
I also loved Calvin’s imagination, a world within itself. Like so many of the things I’m remembering as I write now, I didn’t have the words to properly express what this meant to me. With hindsight and life’s experience as my guide, I believe I too wanted my imagination to create such worlds. I wanted to disappear into worlds like those of Spaceman Spiff and Tracer Bullet. But I couldn’t; instead, I used Calvin and Hobbes as a temporary portal into another world.
Along with providing me joy and release and relief, Calvin and Hobbes also led me to other comic strips, namely The Far Side and Bloom County. While I don’t think either of these strips hold a candle to Calvin and Hobbes in terms of writing or singular art, they were still good and intriguing (though I likely didn’t get about 90% of the Bloom County jokes nor 60% of the Far Side’s humor). Continuing to delve into this comic world, I realized I had found a new way to create worlds. Being the lazy, but particular, connoisseur of single slices of turkey, I decided to mimic the easiest of these strips to mimic: The Far Side. This is not to say that I believed I could draw as well as Garry Larson (I couldn’t and still can’t) nor write as humorously (ditto on the former parenthetical), The Far Side did have one thing going for it: It was only one panel at a time. Therefore, I could create more individual products of the larger world I was imagining, and therefore, be more successful. Or something like that. In short, I didn’t want to draw three or four panels, I wanted to draw one. While this meant less drawing, it meant that each panel had to have more pinpoint and precise humor. Though I wasn’t thinking of that when I took this route. Now that I knew the format, I had to imagine where my world would take place and who would populate it. Like all artists, whether they want to admit or not, I started thinking of all the things I loved in art and how I could imitate that.
By this point, I had become aware of the sitcom Cheers. I was in awe of Cheers, though I cannot say why. I believe it had to do with the fact that almost all of the show took place on one large, detailed set, and that the characters were all so goddamn likable. I likely didn’t get at least half the jokes (probably more), but I knew I enjoyed being in that place with those people. Therefore, around the age of nine (or so), I decided to create my own bar with endearing characters. I had tried one sip of my uncle’s beer three years before, so I felt I knew enough about alcohol to surge forward.
For reasons I cannot recall, I decided to look up the French word for Bar. Or that’s at least what I recall coming across. The name I chose was “Jacquery”, which I could have sworn meant bar or tavern in French, but upon a cursory Google search, it had much more focus on “Jacquerie”, which appears to have been a peasant revolt in France in 1358 during the 100 years War. Man, that’s way better than Tavern! Therefore, let’s allow a little revisionist history and say that I created this little Cheers/Far Side ripoff and named it after a peasant revolt from 1358. Why the hell not?! Whatever the origin of the title, I started creating characters and drawing comics. Most of the characters were really just facilities of the characters I knew from Cheers; the only character coming back to me at this moment is a large man who sat in the same stool, a la Norm. As I started pumping out these comics, I felt myself growing more and more proud. Of what, I could not say; perhaps it was just that I had made something wholly new (or as wholly new as most art can be) and had released it into the world. I had no inclination that what I was going to do was ever going to be seen by anyone outside of my immediate family and perhaps close friend or two. I believe it had a lot to do with the fact that I had found a productive way to pass the time, or better yet: that I did not notice the passing of time quite as much. The existential maw I was just getting aquatinted with seemed to ease a bit during creation.
Years later, I realize that the creation for its own purpose was what was beginning to save my life. I would scribble on that lined paper, or in the blank pages of a sketchbook; I would create a world in hopes of making sense of my own. Or at least to provide me with a reprieve from the world in which I found myself. I could not have put these words to it at the time; instead, I would wander around my house or yard and think of the characters and settings I had made and smile.
