Anniversary year: 30 years of publishing comics

This year marks a surprising number of comic-related anniversaries for me as a creator. For instance, 30 years ago this month was the first time I went beyond making one-off pencil on-notebook-paper comics for my own enjoyment, and publishing them in a format I could share and distribute to my friends and other readers. Granted, the first few such issues were done with such miniscule print runs that it wasn’t all that different, but it still planted a seed that continues to grow even today…

During early 1982, while not doing the projects in our 9th grade honors science class, I started making comics with my friend Robert Macke (somehow I passed that class with an A, though all I remember from it is drawing comics and playing Ace of Aces). Robert liked my pencil on notebook paper minicomics of Hulk vs. the X-Men (in the Obnoxio the Clown vs. the X-men mode, for those of you who remember that one-shot comic), and we worked together to produce four issues of Black Market Comics— so named because we were illegally using DC’s Firestorm character (who, coincidentally, had recently debuted in his second series) as our protagonist. Even though we came up with all-original villains for him to fight in the stories, we didn’t think to come up with a hero of our own, for some reason. I wrote and penciled the stories (15-page 8.5 x 11″ issues), with Robert providing a slick finish I couldn’t pull off (& still can’t be bothered to do most of the time even today) for the first three issues; the fourth issue I largely finished on my own over summer vacation.