A Sketchy Story
When I sat down to do this blog post my original thought was to talk about how drawing informed my writing.
But the truth is, I’ve been drawing for years, and I know some people —especially my family— are probably wondering why I stopped. Even if you don’t know me, you may have seen the sketch work I’ve done for The Case Of The Cheap Suit Plot and thought to yourself, “Is this guy a writer or an artist?” Why have I chosen to go the writer route instead of the visual artist route?
There’s no short, easy answer. I realize that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks I should do, only what I want to do. But I want to offer something of an explanation, so I think I’ll address that in tonight’s post.
I’ve been drawing since I was old enough to hold a pencil. My earliest memories of it are sitting in an IHOP on Long Island drawing these weird characters that were some strange amalgamation of stick figure, pac-man, dinosaur, and superhero. I don’t think any of them had names, all I can recall is that I could tell which ones were the good guys because they wore capes.
Some of my earliest creations. Monsters built only to fight for my amusement. Mwa ha ha. …Shut up, I was like, five years old.
As I got older I continued to draw, but not with any kind of focus. By the time I was in middle school, I had realized I had a considerable bit of talent. At some point, I started drawing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, my art evolving from single pictures, to entire comic books, complete with my own original mutant characters to fight with or against the heroes in a half-shell.
Once I realized my characters could have their own stories, I branched out even more, creating my first truly original character idea in its own comic book.
Captain Kick was a Donkey from Pluto where Animals evolved into sapient creatures. On his world, Captain Kick was a Batman-like hero; a rich philanthropist, and volunteer firefighter by day, and a crime-fighting caped crusader by night. With his human sidekick, a child-prodigy inventor named Troy —a ‘chosen one’ trope subversion before I knew what tropes were— Captain Kick would defend his world from all manner of evil. The reoccurring antagonists were the Space Pirates led by the nefarious Long John Cuda. (The space pirates were this weird mashup of fish and dinosaurs, with Long John Cuda being a cross between a Barracuda and a Tyrannosaurus Rex… somehow.)
The one and only Captain Kick. Created when I was just thirteen years old.
The cast of this comic book grew as well, beginning with a love interest for Troy; his next-door neighbor, a young lady named Lisa who was every bit as intelligent and daring as he, enough so to follow him out to the edge of the solar system from Earth without an alien donkey to help her. (Being a boy, I completely failed to see her as anything beyond kissy-face romantic entanglements to fluster Troy and make Captain Kick roll his eyes.
By the end of middle school, I had a Justice League’s worth of heroes and Rogues to duke it out in the comic books I would draw on 8x10 printer paper or in notebooks that were supposed to be for my schoolwork. My ADHD had me drawing through class, so as a student I was terrible. But other kids enjoyed my comics when I shared them.
And I didn’t share them often. I was bullied daily, all the way up through high school, and bullies had no use for the dorky kid’s stupid drawings. I would lose literally weeks of work if a bully destroyed my comics, so I began to only bring in the pages I was working on. Even then, I would only share them if I truly trusted the people asking to see them.
After High school, I joined the Navy, and the military life all but killed my desire to draw. It was no longer an outlet, but a detriment. Sketchbooks took up space, and that was at a premium when everything you owned was supposed to fit into two lockers. I’d still buy them, and draw on occasion, but I became so depressed, that I felt I’d nearly lost my ability.
Occasionally I did a good drawing here and there. I imagined my girlfriend as a time-cop-style action hero, which I thought was a pretty good sketch. Later I got into using Adobe Photoshop to color other artwork including an original digital piece I did just for fun.
Sometimes I need to remind myself that this was done for fun. Seriously, I’m pretty damn proud of this particular piece.
But while drawing is easy, turning it into a profit is another story. Every artist runs into a wall at some point, where they realize that if they’re going to make art their career, they’re going to do it in a world that sees them as lazy and will consistently undercut the value of their work. At some point the idea of ‘following my dream’ began to feel like following everyone else’s dream for me.
But through my Navy years I began to write more. The storyteller still functioned. After a couple of false starts —ideas I have not given up on entirely by the way— The Case Of The Cheap Suit Plot came around and everything just kind of… snapped into place.
For me, art has always been a means to explore ideas, but at the end of the day, the most important part was telling the story, not the medium.
Maybe in a future blog I’ll go back and show you what some of these false starts looked like. There’s a lot, and I don’t think all of them were bad ideas. I may even revive Captain Kick at some point. But first, I have five Chloe Stewart Novels to finish plus short stories. Everything else comes later.
