This story from 1999 is another of the pieces I really enjoyed creating during my seven & a half years of Larry’s Kitchen zines (more about that here). I recently got it scanned & tidied up for my compilation project, and thought I’d share it with you here. It’s the prequel origin of the Old Guy, the venerated hero in my very first comic from 1982, a character who I came to enjoy more under the name Emmett Elder … and who you might know better as Watusi’s sidekick in “Watusi and the Emerald Serpent”! I wanted the visuals for this story to be like that in some of the B-character features from Golden Age comics, so I dug out my 1970s treasury reprints and used “Johnny Thunder” and “Spy Smasher” for inspiration.
(And for those of you aren’t comic book fans, the last gag is that Emmett is made entirely from wood … which just so happened was also the Golden Age Green Lantern’s weakness!)
By the way, I never completed that “Comic Hero Primer” I mentioned … I just found comics that were more fun to make that superhero comics, whether straight or satirical! Tho I do still get a kick out of mimicking the simple art and sometimes wonky story flow from those early days of comic books…
[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]
Smeary Soapbox Press 