Comic Relief

So why am I into comics?
When I was about 12 years old, I entered middle school, terrified of the impending social change I was to endure.  I knew a few classmates from my grade school days, but they were in maybe ONE of my classes, the rest being filled with strangers I felt were surely staring me down in judgment.  I was positive they noticed my greasy hair (even though I showered before coming to school), or my big glasses, or I'd say something stupid and they'd all laugh.  To some degree, I was right.  That's middle school.  Within a week I was attracting the unwanted attention of the more popular kids, someone lower on the rung to make fun of.  I wasn't mercilessly bullied in middle school, I know damn well others had it worse.  Half the time I was fairly invisible. 
There were a couple friendly faces, and over time I would end up befriending other geeks (because that's what i was labeled by then).  I was somewhat into comics before, but it was around this time that I really got into them.  They provided an escape for me.  I liked superheroes, because obviously they were what I was not.  But they frustrated me to no end.  Why?  Because even the geeks had girlfriends.  Peter Parker his Mary Jane, Tim Drake his...fuck that guy was juggling girls.  Me?  Girls thought I was weird because I wrote a rap about setting teachers on fire.  I didn't know how to talk to them, so I resorted to aloofness, which at that age backfires horribly. 
Enough about the girls, though.  I've more or less fixed that problem by hanging out with cooler girls.  Because of said unpopularity, I spent quite a bit of time alone.  When I came home from school, I went to my room, turned on my TV, sat at my drawing desk and went to town.  Sometimes I'd walk to my sister's place after school, a half-hour 5-mile walk to a trailer park on the edge of town, punctuated by a stop to the Arcade downtown to buy a couple comics.  In my alone time, I learned that drawing made me happy.  I loved comics, I dreamed of stories myself, so one day I finally started trying to make one.
I made tons of drawings of characters I made up myself, worked at understanding muscle-structure--without actually knowing which muscles I was drawing, eventually even managed a couple pages of dialogue.  One day I drew a 5-7 page booklet about "Thunderbolt", a hero who shot electricity out of battery-powered gauntlets on his arms.  He met Batman.  I don't know why. 
The next comic I drew was another made-up character called "The Nightmare".  He was a high school kid that looked like me, who was the nephew of Thunderbolt.  He was NOBODY's sidekick, though.  In fact, he even had his own tech-nerd, a foreshadowed sadomasochist who knew too much about the school's basement layout.  Plus a girl who was totally into him.  Gee, didn't go into fantasy-land much, did I?  I actually managed a full 22 pages, ripping off various comics along the way, including a two-page spread of him swinging on a rope straight through the windows of a car, which came from a Batman comic.  After the story I wrote a short 2-page vignette where I sent him to Hell. 
After that ONE issue, I didn't do anymore comics.  I don't know why, I guess I just kept drawing other stuff, like the entire cast and then some of Mortal Kombat 2.  My Doug, I really was a fucking geek.  I did make the attempt, once or twice, at scripting a new comic.  But nothing.
In late winter of 2006, I was sitting at work one night when I had the idea to do a comic about pimps with weird powers.  I made Kevin my guinea pig model and turned him into Dr. Golden Brown Kevin Sneed.  Golden Brown became my 3-year long experimentation with comics.  I learned what jokes worked and what didn't, how to sequence a story and action shots.  I drank with a demon.  I'm very proud of Golden Brown, because of what it taught me about storytelling.  I sent it off once to a local publisher, and was told that he showed it to 2 people.  One was a "hillbilly-type" southerner, the other, a black guy who had grown up in "the mean streets of Detroit".  The hillbilly thought is was quite funny, the black guy thought found it relied too much on outdated Ebonics and was slightly offensive.  My first thought was "how convenient that he had two very polarized audiences to work with!"  My second thought was "A pimp parodying 70's blacksploitation films, yes that would require outdated Ebonics so I don't understand the criticism".  My third thought was, "Only slightly offensive?"  Needless to say, it did not get published. 
While attending art school, I took a comics class and actually made some pretty good short comics.  I resurrected my demon Hellken from Golden Brown and placed him in a Dantean Hell wanting twinkies.  I drew a 3-page wordless story about a lighthouse where baaaaad things happen.  I depicted Rasputin's last night alive.  I spun Little Red Riding Hood into a story about a Romanian secret order of the wolf run by Bunica (Grandmother) Giurescu.  I turned my brother and I into zombies.  I did pretty fucking well by myself creatively.  My latest comic, Banjo's Tune, is not really different.  I abandoned the shading lines I'd used previously.  I developed my characters more.  I learned how to draw a guitar better. 
It's still escapism for me, just a little.  But every time I finish a page, I feel so good about myself.  Every time I sit down to work at penciling or inking, turn on some music or a horror movie, I feel at home, in perfect solitude.