Notes on Stupid Childhood Comics

     When I was a kid I had a stupid little comic strip called Wormy & Stoopy, starring an oval I called a worm and a stick figure with buckteeth. It began as a coping mechanism in church, where my boredom inevitably reached a critical level. This was stream of consciousness at its most basic; I’d grab a piece of paper (or rather, a donation card from the pew in front of me) with, AT MOST, an idea like “amusement park” or “guinea pig” to draw from for my plot. Then I’d just fill the page. The plot, the jokes, the dialogue… everything was formed at the same time as the final pencil marks. Hindsight being 20/20 I think this might be the ideal approach for me in terms of writing in general. In a way, I was dealing with the same timelines and deadlines back then as a kid: my attention span. I would draw until the end of the page was reached and/or my attention drifted to something shinier or video game-ier. These days I all too often approach my comics like a “writer;” I get the plot hammered out beforehand, and then actually put pen to paper. And it often sucks. Working that way removes your ability and willingness to be surprised for the vast majority of the process. It locks you in to a specific path, and if you’re looking to make someone laugh, or hell, just tell a good story, that’s the last thing you want: to be predictable.

     There’s something so pure about that “improvised” Wormy & Stoopy approach (which shows like Adventure Time have down to a science) that I need to find again, because I find that unfunny jokes are harder to stomach if they've clearly been written and rewritten. If you don’t laugh at a given joke in Adventure Time, it’s simply because it didn’t hit you as hard as some of the other ones did. The chemistry of absurdity between you and the show just didn’t line up. This is a marked difference from a failed joke in, say, Two and a Half Men (AKA ALL THE JOKES HEY-OOOOOOH), where you just wince in uncomfortable silence while the canned laughter drones on like a detuned radio. I, unfortunately, went through this wormhole to unfunny and am now trying to claw my way back.

     There was a point during Wormy & Stoopy’s “run” where I started to actually attempt “writing” and “drawing.” I would meditate on jokes before I put them down, and meditate on what people would look like in the strip. Guess what? Those are the strips I hate the most today, because it’s me trying to be funny and/or artistic rather than just drawing what made me laugh. They’re the strips that make me wince as opposed to the older ones, where I mostly just wonder “what the hell was going through my head?”

I think my favorite Wormy & Stoopy strip was one that had no words at all; it entailed Wormy unknowingly taking a shrinking potion and urgently trying to get the now-colossal Stoopy’s attention by climbing him, while Stoopy was completely oblivious, repeatedly shaking Wormy off and occasionally trampling him under random bouts of tap dancing.

     There’s something about that spontaneous approach to writing that ends up being timeless, as opposed to actually sitting and trying to write jokes, where it’s more likely than not that the next morning I’ll wake up and hate what I wrote; or, in this case, I’ll hate what I wrote for 20 agonizing hours.

     I also think it’s important, at least in comedy writing, to completely ignore outside feedback because you can’t really adjust your sense of humor to include everyone. Unless, of course, you’re working with people who share your exact sense of humor—in which case, you’re lucky. I like fart and butthole jokes, but I know for a fact not everyone does. But if I neglect the less vanilla aspects of my humor, it’s basically me neutering what could potentially be my strongest material. That’s another thing I did in the 24-hour comic challenge, and it’s something I’ve been doing too much in general.

All this rambling is stuff that the 24-hour comic got me thinking of. And while I didn’t end up with something I liked, hey, I learned from it. And as many people have said in many ways, reaching the end of the exercise is never the point of the exercise.