When I was twelve, I tried to create a comic over the summer.  It was, like most comics created by kids, a mish-mash of cheap jokes and ideas lifted from comics I read at the time.  Comics like “Bloom County”, “Garfield”, and “Pogo” reprints.  The idea of it was very much the same, structure-wise, as Bloom County - humans and talking animals.  One of them was a turtle, who smoked cigars and wore a derby, named (for some reason I can’t recall as an adult) Stapleton.

Flash-forward almost a year and a half.  My youth minister, who’d been a journalist, was doing a youth group newsletter and wanted someone else to take it over.  For some reason that fell to me.  He told me it needed to have news for the youth group, a Bible-related article, and the last page could be a comic.  I pulled the comic idea back out, replaced all the humans in the comic with people in our youth group, and dropped all the animal characters but Stapleton.  About a year later I was told he had to stop smoking the cigar by the new youth minister.

I quit that church in Autumn of 1991 for a host of reasons and started attending a nearby Methodist church.  I turned the newsletter over to another kid when I did.  At the time, I was on newspaper and yearbook staff at my high school (the newspaper was and still is named the Palantir, Tolkien nerds, and the school had permission fro Tolkien himself a few years before he passed).  I was doing the “political” cartoons for the paper (I was state ranked for that sophomore through senior year, and nationally ranked my senior year).  I was also doing a super parody comic book based off a friend of mine.  But I kind of missed the turtle.

My junior and senior years I got to do a comic strip in the newspaper.  I brought Stapleton (and his cigar) back and paired him with a little girl named Pandora who was basically horrible.  Unsurprisingly (and uninterestingly), the comic was called, “Pandora’s Box” - CUZ THE COMIC HAD IT’S OWN BOX IN THE PAPER, GET IT?  Ugh. For two years I got away with jokes I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to get away with.  After that, I never really used him or Pandora again

And I’ve never really used him since.  Every once in a while I mess around with him.  The weird thing is he looks ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME in design as he did when I was 13 (the design from when I was 12… no idea what I was thinking).  I considered using him for a movie review comic that only focuses on the B and C grade movies people consider renting and think better of it.  I dunno.

Oh, and I still have all that old art at my parents’ house.  Which, honestly, is kinda weird.

A weird aside.  Years ago I was looking through a box of records for sale.  On the cover of “Cheap Thrills” by the band Big Brother & the Holding Time from 1968 was, amongst other things, a cigar smoking, hat wearing turtle looking mournfully at betting forms.  The entire cover was drawn by R. Crumb.  Thing is, I was definitely NOT raised around rock music (nothing after 1960, anyway) so I know I never saw it.  But it was surprising.

And that’s my uninteresting ramble for the day.