I’ve written before about my time spent as a member of APA-5 and what a large part it played in finding a voice for my cartooning work. It gave me a free-form venue were I could make any sort of comics without concern for its final printed form. One of those comics (this one, in fact), introduced Drake, my own evil twin! In best evil twin form, he embodies a lot of the things I don’t like about comics, and back then that included the whole bad girl/softcore genre that filled comic distributor catalogs. There’s a lot about the comics medium (words + pictures) I love, but there’s a lot about the culture of comics that is definitely cringe-worthy … and that’s the kind of stuff Drake loves!
A couple of names of other APA-5 members are dropped in here, where Drake pitches edits on their work to get more in line with what he wants to see. Those mailing comments were a big part of APA-5 membership, but I usually kept them as a separate text section. Integrating them into my content as I did here was a rare occurrence.
I’ve also mentioned before how I’m working to get the content from my APA-5 years digitized & into a form that I can share, and this is a part of that effort. Because [SPOILER ALERT] Drake ended up playing a fairly large role in that body of work…
[January 2023 UPDATE: this post originally appeared on my now-closed Patreon page.]
Smeary Soapbox Press 
Thanks for posting this, Dale! I’ve been curious about Drake and this was a good introduction to the smarmy jerk! I look forward to seeing his next appearance!
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