Extremely Small-Press Publishing
2004-06-02

Can there be any comics fans who haven't at some stage wanted to create their own comics?

I know I have. I invented my own superhero team back when I was barely knee-high to a Dennis Hopper; about eight years old. I can't remember that much about them now, but I do recall that they were my own take on The Avengers. Except they were Irish. That's because I, your friendless neighbourhood Sprout, come from the Emerald Isle (though thankfully not the one that Garth Ennis so delightfully portrayed in 2000 AD some years back).

Let's see... There was The Image, who had the power to manipulate light. That meant that he could generate holograms, fire lasers from his eyes, turn himself invisible, and see in the dark (useful one, that). It never occurred to me that an invisible superhero would also be blind (because the light would pass through his eyes), but then it also never occurred to Stan Lee when he created The Fantastic Four, so I was in good company there.

There was also The Skeleton. I can't remember what powers he had (the ability to star in Ray Harryhausen movies, perhaps?), but I do recall that his real name was Frank Skelton. Not, I grant you, the most opaque of secret identities.

I can also remember one - who may not have been in my Irish version of the Avengers; he might have been invented separately - whose name was Super Trooper. He was a soldier with lots and lots of weapons. He was completely unkillable, but he didn't feature in many of my home-made comics because he took too long to draw. I guess I should have had him, say, stripped to the waist and with only one gun. Yeah! That would have worked. Also, he should have been blue.

And there was also The Whizzer. He could run very fast when he swallowed his speed pills. Oh yes. But remember; I was eight. I'd never heard of amphetamines. No, The Whizzer popped pills because that's what Giant Man used to do. Remember that? "Great Scott! They're headed right for me! I've only got a split second to take one of my shrinking pills which I keep here in my belt pouch with the fiddly clasp! Ooops, dropped it! Darn these loose-fitting gloves! There! Got one! Now I'll swallow the pill and shrink as such a great speed that my enemies will think that I've become invisible!" "What the-!? He's disappeared!" "Perhaps he's turned invisible?" "Don't be stupid: if he was invisible, he'd be blind, wouldn't he?"

The Whizzer was very much my own invention... But annoyingly, shortly after his debut, there was an issue of The Avengers that featured a super-fast baddie called The Whizzer. He also popped speed pills. Fer cryin' out loud! That's been happening to me all my life: I come up with a great idea, then someone steals it and goes back in time. It also happened with my great future-cop, Barrister Fear.

Anyway, about a year or so after that, my friends and I decided that we really, really had to make our own comic. None of us could draw particularly well, but what we lacked in skill we made up in self-delusion. We were an enthusiastic if talentless creative team: There was me, Brian, Robert and Shane, and we set about the task with gusto. Sadly, Gusto left the team early on and we were forced to struggle ahead without him.

We knew that duplicating the comics would be a problem. Photocopiers were around at the time but we knew no one who had access to one. No, the only chance we had was the school's stencil thingy. Older readers will know the kind of device I mean: a big rotating drum that operated under pupil-power and produced poor-quality copies in purple ink that smelled strongly of what we liked to believe was alcohol - whenever the teacher handed out something we'd all sniff the pages and persuade ourselves that we were getting drunk.

Unfortunately, Young Sprout and his pals were refused access to this jealously and zealously-guarded device, so we decided that we'd concentrate on making just one copy and then when everyone saw how brilliant it was they'd be falling over themselves in order to provide financial support.

As is the way with nine-year-olds, we didn't actually get anywhere. Despite many passionate beginnings, none of our comics ever made it past the first page. Which is probably just as well, because they were crap; we made the mistake of starting to write and draw them before we knew what they were supposed to be about (a mistake that I find is also very common to a lot of grown-up writers).

Then Brian got himself a printing kit for his birthday. This was basically an ink-pad, a frame thingy, and lots of letters and numbers which you were supposed to fit into the frame thingy. It was sort of "My First Typesetting Kit". You set out the text, inked it up, and stamped it down on the page: hey presto, printing! Armed with this remarkable piece of high-technology, we started a new comic from scratch. This one wasn't going to be about superheroes or spacemen: No, we'd examined the market and come to the conclusion that what was really selling was The Beano and its contemporaries (Whoopee, Shiver and Shake, Whizzer and Chips, Assault and Battery - well, maybe not that last one).

We decided that a kids' comic based around nursery rhymes would be the best option: It was to be called Humpty!. It would have a colour cover - thanks to my little sister's coloured pencils - and to make things easier, there would be no speech balloons; like a few other kids' comics of the time, it would have the text underneath the pictures. A lot simpler to do, plus it meant that we could utilise the printing kit.

So we drew the first page - leaving lots of space for the text - then Brian set up the printing frame thingie. He loaded it with the right characters, inked it up, stamped it down on the page... And the text was the wrong way around. We'd forgotten that the printing is a mirror-image of the plate, and none of us had had the intelligence to test it out on a spare page first.

That meant we had to draw the first page again. When this was done, Brian emptied the frame and re-loaded it, inked it up, stamped it down on the newly-drawn page... And it was back-to-front again.

Thus ends the saga of Humpty!, the greatest kids' comic that never was.

Now, let's roll on to 1979, or thereabouts... Sprout is in his early teens, and decides that he wants to create a Judge Dredd fanzine. The main feature would be a "novelisation" of the first Judge Death story, encompassing lots of the Dredd back-story to flesh it out. This fanzine fared no better than any of the comics; I got about a page and a half into the Death story and gave up. This was mainly because I was hammering it out on my mother's ancient manual portable typewriter and the noise was driving everyone in the house crazy. Well, crazier.

But if I'd kept at it, I might have produced something that looked half-way decent, because, while desk-top publishing was still a long way off, there was something available that was just as good: Letraset! Yes, for a mere five weeks' pocket money, it was possible to buy a couple of sheets of molecule-thin plasticy stuff that came in a wide variety of illegible typefaces that read, and I quote, "aaaaaabbbbbbccccc" etc. To use this stuff, you placed the sheet over the desired location and scribbled on the topside using a soft pencil. This had the effect of loosening the letter from the sheet and causing it to stick to the page. If you were very, very lucky, it would work. Most of the time the letters tore, and the rest of the time they went on wonky and you had to start again.

There was another lettering tool around at the time, similar to the little sheet of decals we used to get with Airfix kits. The trick with this stuff was to cut out the required letters, soak them in a saucer of water for a couple of minutes, then carefully - using a tweezers and a simple household electron microscope - peel off the backing paper and stick the letters onto a sheet of paper. A success it was not. Most of the time the letters tore, and the rest of the time they went on wonky you had to start again.

After spending far too much time just attempting to get the first page of the fanzine done, and having realised that I still didn't have an easy way to make copies, I gave up.

I made a few more half-hearted and half-arsed attempts at creating my own comics in the subsequent years, but all came to nought.

But if any young people are reading this; don't despair! Just because all of my attempts failed, that doesn't mean that yours won't be brilliant. And even if yours do fail, rest assured that one day - in the far future - you might be able to use your experiences to quickly churn out a smarmy article when you're up against a deadline.