My First Book!

In 1st and 2nd grade the teachers would give us these little blank books made from torn paper stapled together with two pieces of floral wallpaper.  It was actually really cool; I'm not sure why by 3rd grade they stopped having this be part of class while learning cursive and never using it again was evidently of mucho importance.

All of my books were a surreal trip into my cartoon-fueled unconscious.  This one is called Giga Pets, which was a virtual pet computer game you'd get on a keychain that you'd clip to your backpack or something.  (I never actually had a Giga Pet, I had a Tamagotchi, which was similar, I was just misremembering.)  It was this little, pixelated blob that would hatch from an egg and need to be fed and have its poop cleaned and such.  They were banned from schools as a distraction because if you didn't take care of it for half a day it would die, so even Kindergartners with just a half day of school would be negligent murderers.

So of course I had very fond memories of this minor fad from preschool, and combined those memories with my love for Pokemon, cartoons and kitties.  To this day that love has never faded.

   

(As you can see the cut up script for the book has folded over.  It says:
"SO, what's your name?" asked Max.
"Comet", he said in a shaky voice.
"Okay.  Do you want some pretzles?" asked Max.
"Yes please.  Yummm". He changed into a different creature.
"I packed two things-a soda and a sword", said Max.  "Do you want a sip?
But Comet was chasing another creature and couldn't stop for a drink.

*(I'm pretty sure that last part about how he couldn't stop for a drink was added by one of my teachers to bring some cohesion to the nonsense.  The cat fishing with its tail was a common motif in my drawings back then.)

*(There's a goomba from Super Mario Bros. as part of the evolution, or 'deevolution'.  I had this whole thing about 'felines and canines' that's in some of the other books I did .  I learned that canine was a word for a tooth and dogs, so I guess I liked the wordplay of it or something, referring to both the Devil's teeth and that dog shooting Godzilla beams at him.)

*(This is where the blue box from Mulholland Dr. is opened and everything really goes to hell.  For some reason I drew CatDog.  I didn't even really like CatDog.)

*(I really like this shit about how I freed God and the animals like the end of a stage in Sonic the Hedgehog.  It's like I was more powerful than God; he wasn't powerful enough to save himself, but I was.  I was already a heretic and I didn't even know it.)

*(Here's the same page with the door opened and there's a house inside.  Fucking Duck Amuck weirdness up in here.  It's also funny how God can't grow a mustache for shit.)

*(Not a mistake here.  These are all pages.  I sort of felt like I had to fill all of them up.)

*(I'm throwing a tomato at the wall.  That is not a penis ejaculating onto the page; it just happens to look exactly like it.)

THE END?  Who knows?  We ended on such a cliffhanger.  I feel like I put a question-mark after all "THE END"s I did for no reason. 

   SO.  There that is.  I've got at least one other book around here somewhere.  Maybe I'll post more of these.  It's just really interesting seeing the things you created when you were young.  It's like a time capsule for my brain pre-Bush administration; what culture was telling was important at the time as a consumer child.  There was this trend in children's entertainment at the time of the KID THAT IS THE CHOSEN ONE.  The kid that doesn't really do anything but it's already decided that the future of existence entirely depends upon them and only them.  IT IS FATED.  I think my little book here was me putting myself into that role. 


    You see it in everything about Pokemon, the games, show and the merchandise all telling you that YOU TOO can be a Pokemon master, the greatest Pokemon trainer ever!  You just have to buy everything!  Do what comes naturally as a kid in a 1st world country and covet.


   And then you see it in Harry Potter, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Dragonball Z, just so much shit I'd see growing up.  And then you get older and you learn about Joseph Campbell, and see that it's all the Hero's Journey.  It's all stories that we all as humans have told since we developed the mental capacity to tell them, and will tell until we're not around anymore. 


  All of those stories are so similar: Heracles, Achilles, Odysseus, Jesus Christ, King Arthur, Dorothy Gale, Luke Skywalker, Goku, Harry Potter, Link...  They are all this same amorphous figure that rests in our unconscious that just puts on a new face and just acts out the story again, but a little different each time. 


  Because it is all a part of our brain.  The greatest story is the one that is all about the greatness of us a species told through an avatar blank enough to be identifiable, but distinguishable enough to be awe-inspiring, great enough to do great, but flawed enough to fall.  A lot of them even defeat the greatest foe humanity has; the impermanence of life. 

  I of course had no fucking concept of any of this, but it's interesting how when pressed to tell a story, the story I squeezed out from my sponge that soaked up everything around me: video games, toys, kitties, Tex Avery cartoons, etc.,  I also squeezed out a drip of the oldest story that nearly every story soaked up from every other story: The Hero's Journey.

  I've only known how to read since I was 4, I can't even tell a story with coherence and still, the wave of those old stories through the stories I knew, put a sword in my hand, pit me in a battle against the Devil (a Pokemon battle), and fight for the Gods.




  King Arthur fought for England and God, Luke fought for the balance of the Force, I fought for the Pokemanz.