shabba-ganoush

the days of my life are withered away into the internet-i-sphere. seriously.

sunday afternoon, looking thru the closet, wasting (passing) some time trying to clean up and organize some crap while i wait to snipe the ebay auction i have been eyeballing for the past few days (i'll save you the suspense - i lost, about 3 min ago). but yeah, whatever.

looking through the boxes in my closet (for some AV cords), i came across my ol' sketchbook from college. ah yes. my beloved sketchbook. i used to refer to it as "my girlfriend," as it was my most cherised thing in all the world at the time, i would carry it everywhere with me, all the time. Every free moment i would commit thoughts and scribbles and drawings and .. well, sketches in there. late at night, drunk late after a party, after lunch, on the concourse in between classes, etc etc. Brought it all over te place, even to NYC on the few times we'd venture out over thataway (oh yeah, forgot how fun that was..! damn!!)

i kept a pretty full journal in there, back in the day (hard to imagine, i know). Also I started filling up it's pages midway through with a pretty intensely-detailed "comic story," or "graphic sequence" if you'd prefer (not the pornographic type, hah heh.. not from this dweeb!) But yeah I did go out to a good lot of parties back in the college days, and thus inspired I made a comic about college-age (and just post-college-age) young adults living in a somewhat urban setting who hang out and live in ratty apartments and date disphits and smoke blunts drink budweiser and pass out at parties. I suppose it sounds very pedestrian, but at the time it was so captivating to create and this all came out in the story's style. i was getting into "the alternative press", underground-comic-wise, in those days.. bob fingerman, terry laban, evan dorkin, all those fellas. pretty much the same stuff i was making myself, on a vastly inferior scale (mine inferior, that is!) but it was personal and very relevant to me, even though the thing was only like pages or so and not much in the way of, ahem, deep character or story development. definitely influenced by guys like sam kieth, i'd take al these fractured styles of laying things out, bizarre but interesting (and legible "enough") composition, and the dialogue wasn't what you'd call "hot" but it was passable for what it was (pretty much, based on shit you'd hear all the time, anyway)

Not forgotten about by any means, but certainly relegated to the distant attic of my brain. I mean.. i have had DOZENS of sketchbooks, literally, over the years - and more than my fair share of comic-type things I'd made since I was a kid, but this was certainly by far the cream of them. Again, not to say it was much special (and looking back at it now, the anatomy and stuff like that is still all over the place, to say the least) but I look at this as one of the last cool "things" I have made on my own - I say this, considering in the 10+ years since I last lay a finger on the things, I have spend countless hours worth of my career creating "professional art." Yeah and that's all well and good, and lord knows I love CG and all of that.. but I do miss drawing.

I have a scanner, I'll get the thing pasted in here sometime soon, just for the sake of posterity. Even though scanned, it will look horrible and not worthwhile of anything, even to me - it's one of those things where you have to hold the original inked drawn pages in your hand to appreciate the love and care I'd put into it, and even then, you have to be me to really look at it and not think it's just some bullshit. Anyway it makes me want to do some more.. or at least go back to being the type of person who cares about such things.