I never felt comfortable living “up North”. In the 9 months that we lived in New England, split between a one-bedroom apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts and our first larger, two-story house in Nashua, New Hampshire, no where felt like home. As a Floridian transplant, half of my pop culture sensibilities just didn’t transfer to such a starkly different locale. I was covered head to toe in Surf, Skate and BMX wear from my purple Airwalk shoes covered in bats to my T&C shirt with the wraparound imagery of Thrilla Gorilla and Da’ Boys proclaiming “Surf All Day, Rage All Night!” I was an outsider who nothing of hockey (ice, street, or field), Lacrosse, or what any sane person would wear outside to play in 3-foot-high snow drifts. It didn’t help that the apartment was just temporary housing while we were waiting for the construction on our house to be finished, so I wasn’t making any friends in that transitory environment. Nor did it help my mood that in order to save money my folks opted for a single bedroom layout with a tiny kitchen and small living room. They set up a basic twin bed for me, a glorified cot, that sat against the wall where there should have been just enough room for a kitchen table, and we ate all of our meals on the rented furniture in the living room. Because it was such a short-term stay, we kept all of our stuff in storage while we waited for the house, so I didn’t have any of the things that normally brought me joy like the beginnings of my burgeoning coming book collection or any of my action figures. Having a kitchen for my bedroom is about as glamorous as it sounds, and at thirteen, the lack of privacy was the worst. My father would wake up in the middle of the night and come shuffling into the kitchen for a soda in just his tighty-whities, and most nights my mom was up until two or three in the morning watching TV, so it was next to impossible to get any decent sleep. Since I was still getting shuttled off to school across the border in Nashua by my folks every day, I basically became a zombie for those couple of months. The only two things that really brought any sunshine into my life at the time were the fact that we’d order take-out almost every night (because our dish and baking ware were in storage), and that the local stations in Lowell carried some different syndicated cartoons than what I was used to watching in Orlando. So I was introduced to shows like Dinosaucers, Denver the Last Dinosaur, and the Spiral Zone. Those cartoons were a kind of salvation in the starkness of a harsh winter, literally and figuratively, that this boy from sunny Florida who had just been ripped from his best friend, needed desperately.
When we were finally able to ditch the claustrophobic apartment and move into our new house, I was rewarded with both getting a room to myself again, as well as access to all of my cherished stuff. Though I’ve always hated moving, I’d be lying if I said that there isn’t something kind of magical about getting the opportunity to set up a room from scratch. As a kid deciding on some of the more mundane things, like how to arrange the furniture, becomes an exercise in creating little spaces or area to hide or display my treasures. Whether it was placing a hand-me-down desk (my first) with the leg space facing towards the wall, effectively creating a little nook to hide in, or repurposing the set of dresser drawers as a place to store my Lego (bottom drawer), G.I Joe figures (middle drawer) and my comic books (top drawer.)
Chubby me self-soothing with food sometime in 1989/90
The first evening, after everything was neatly arranged, the bed was made, and all of my clothes were folded or hung in the closet, I received a very odd and disconcerting surprise. The neighborhood we’d moved into was fairly new, maybe two or three years old at that point, but there were enough family established in the area that the kids all knew each other really well. So well in fact that they all came to our house as a sort of welcoming committee. My parents though this was adorable, and they marched them right up to my new room where I was sitting at the desk and had no idea ten strange kids were about to invade my private sanctum. I was mortified being beyond shy and super uncomfortable in my own skin thanks to my penchant for using food as a coping mechanism for mild depression. As much as I was hoping to make a new friend or two, I was dreading the idea of having to try and hold court with a whole flock of twelve to fifteen-year-olds. What made it even worse was that they all basically just ignored me and started talking amongst themselves and rifling through all of my stuff like I wasn’t even a person. Though I had no context for this, I distinctly remember feeling like I was at my own funeral.
To my exasperated relief, they all seemed to get bored with my bedroom after about ten minutes and they began filing out, down the carpeted stairs, and back out into the night. I never mentioned how awkward that moment was with my folks, but I made a pact with myself that night that I needed to make a change with who I was, or at least with how I presented myself. Much like I got a chance to arrange my new room as I saw fit, I decided that I’d also remake the mask I presented to the world. I sat back down at my desk and pulled over a small stack of magazines that my mom had bought me for the car ride up from Florida. There was an issue of Cracked’s Monsters Attack, a couple issues of Nintendo Power (the December 1989 issue as well as the Final Fantasy Strategy Guide), and a special one-off tribute to Bugs Bunny that had a bunch of Looney Tunes and Warner Brothers articles.
Flipping through the magazines, I marveled at the amazing Friday the 13th Kills spreadsheet in the issue of Monsters Attack, chuckled at the interview with Kadeem Hardison (Dewayne Wayne himself) in Nintendo Power, and made a note to revisit a section of the the Final Fantasy Strategy Guide where your party of heroes grow up from children to adults. But it was when flipping though the Bugs Bunny magazine when I stumbled across the announcement article for a new cartoon series produced by Steven Spielberg called Tiny Toon Adventures when I knew how I was going to reinvent myself.
As I mentioned above, by this time in my life I was getting into collecting and reading comic books pretty heavily. Like most folks sucked into the pastime, half of the pull to read was the artwork in the issues. I was hardly so hardcore at this point that I was aware of who all the different artists were, at least not by name; I could certainly tell the difference between the illustrations in the Walt Simonson issues of X-Factor or the Jim Lee and Marc Silverstri issues of the Uncanny X-Men that I’d managed to get my hands on. But I wasn’t tracking this like I would begin to over the next couple of years. That said, I was absolutely floored by the artwork, and I’d spend a lot of free time day-dreaming that I could maybe learn to draw in that style. But while looking over the article on the Tiny Toons, it struck me that maybe I was getting to close to trying to learn how to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool. There was a page (the above image) featuring a portrait of Steven Spielberg posing with a bunch of the new cast of animated characters crawling all over him. Looking at these I felt like if I put my mind to it I could reproduce some of those illustrations. So, I snuck into my father’s new home office (he was working from home in his new position and the company provided a completely new office furniture set along with a snazzy IBM monotone monitor computer, fax machine and dot matrix printer), and stole a large swath of continuous feed printer paper, the kind with the perforations between pages and the strips of tear-off side strips with the holes so that it could feed into the printer correctly.
I went back into my room with the contraband stack of paper, tore off a sheet and started on my first attempt at copying one of the Tiny Toon characters from the picture in the magazine. I chose Plucky Duck because he seemed like one of the simpler designs and he was almost entirely unobstructed (as opposed to say Buster Bunny where I’d have to figure out how his left arm and leg looked on my own.) Over the course of that night and every night over the following week I kept drawing and re-drawing as many of these characters as I could without hitting that weird mental wall of feeling accomplished with what I saw as a decent drawing, and not wanting to tax myself by potentially doing a bad copy and wasting an hour. This was the beginning of that mental struggle while being creative where I started to develop odd rituals and superstitions, but that’s a story for another time. After the week was up, my plan was to stuff as many of the good drawings as I could into a Trapper Keeper and attempt to sell them at school the following week. My thought process was that if the other kids saw me as an artist, they might let me draw stuff for them, and in turn would like me because I was providing a vital service. Flawed logic for sure, but at the time it seemed like a rock-solid idea.
To my surprise and dismay, it didn’t work. At all. Not while I was living “up North” at least. Luckily, I wasn’t upset enough to be deterred, and I kept plugging away at the Tiny Toon drawings. And I kept it up while my family was unexpected forced to relocate once again, this time back down south to the Atlanta area. By this time, I was getting pretty good at copying the various Tiny Toons characters, and I started to seek out as much imagery of them as I could find. I was clipping advertisements out of the TV guide, collecting the eventual Topps trading cards, and picking up pages of stickers from the Hallmark store when I’d tag along with my mother. I was doing my best to amass a huge collection of imagery to steal from and hanging onto all of my drawings as a sort of portfolio. I’d re-draw the same characters in the same pose and upgrade the example in my Trapper Keeper, so that my best work was always ready for display. And this was one of the ways that I eventually eked my way into a friendship with a small group of like-minded kids in middle school during the 8th grade. And though I’m hardly an accomplished artist as an adult, I’m decent enough to be dangerous and I can trace it back to as well as owing a huge debt to not only the Tiny Toon characters, but that special issue of the Bugs Bunny magazine that I had no idea would change my life when I chose it. Unfortunately, of all the drawings I managed to hang onto from Middle school, none of my original Tiny Toons drawings made it along the way. But you can imagine how bad they were right?
