Out and About in Kitsilano

3:28am

Two old ladies in a grey Prius pull up alongside me as I walk to the 7-11 for a late-night keep-me-awake coffee. Apparently not from the area they need directions. Also apparently unable to fight their gambling addiction they ask where they can find the Casino.

It is not a normal December night.

Ber-Kewwww Goes the Laser Cannon

I honestly believe that if interstellar space travel was invented I would quite my job to become a space-pirate.

Does this make me a bad person? And more importantly who wants to be on my crew?

A Tale of Intrigue and Betrayal

The first time I saw the comics editor for the Gauntlet, the University of Calgary newspaper, there were a few things about her that stuck in my memory. These images have stayed there longer than her name, naturally, as I have always found pictures easier to remember than words. She was Asian and she had a mess of dreadlocks that were clearly her pride and joy. From her appearance I quickly deduced she was an arts major, probably specializing in drawing, but what I didn't expect, couldn't expect, from this comics editor was that she was completely humourless. Had she been at the initial Gauntlet staff meeting, the events of this tale might have never happened, but she didn't and they didn't either.

Devin and I were bright eyed and somewhat naive freshmen. I had yet to learn that Geology was all about finding oil on a map and he had yet to learn just how much math was required to be a comp sci major. We also had the misguided belief, fresh off a "bang-up" job as events coordinators on our student council, that extra-curricular activities were the place for us. That is how we came to join up with the Gauntlet. I could draw and together we made a decent writing team so naturally comics seemed like the right fit, not to mention with a full course load the least time commitment.

We, in our youthful naivety, were also convinced that we would be the greatest thing the comics page had ever seen. Surely with our combined genius and superior art could blow the pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, poorly drawn comics that adorned the back page out of the water. Of course our first mistake was probably that we didn't realize that maybe there was a reason that all the comics were the same. Of course hindsight is 20/20 and my foresight is legally blind so we went in pencils blazing, or at least slightly warm.

Comic-ing is a tricky business, especially at the get-go. You have to introduce your main characters, and at a once a week interval you have to do it pretty fast. So basically we had three panels to make our characters memorable. We chose three panels over the then popular, anime-inspired 4-panel layout because well we wanted to show that we didn't need to play to everyone's love of anime to be a success. We wanted to show that we were the rebellious new kids in town and so in our first comic we did what we thought would be edgy, but what any college student worth their salt knows is pretty much the college comic standard for first comics. We made fun of the paper publishing us. Except we were nerds, and thus secretly yearned for acceptance, so we included a disclaimer that was pro-Gauntlet and cleverly self-effacing.
Needless to say we hated it. But the deadline was closing in so we submitted it anyways and promised ourselves we would make up for it with the greatest second comic ever created. But before we could do that we would learn that the good folks at the gauntlet felt it necessary to change the font on our comic to a tiny and nearly unreadable version of comic sans.

At this point in my life I was still a dedicated science student, jacked up on caffeine and quantum theory, and hadn't developed my stern sense of artist integrity that I have today. No sir, all I cared about was that I had made the papers and was now a published illustrator. I mattered and nobody could tell me different. Devin and I were on the top of the world. Any day now, we were convinced, the fan mail would come pouring in.

Of course, the fan mail would have to wait because we still had the Greatest Ever Second Comic to create. This time we wouldn't have to introduce ourselves. This time we could show the readers what we really were. This time we could really be rebels. It was time for us to be lewd and crude and well, really that was it. We made a penis joke, I drew some skellingtons, and in our unique, daring, and trailblazing style we made fun of math.

We didn't want to alienate all of our fans however with this new and enterprising direction so we included another disclaimer under the pretence that we didn't want any feminazis (which TV assured us made up a bulk of the female student body) to hate us for the penis joke.

The mail man must have been so overwhelmed by all the fan-mail we were receiving because he was unable to deliver any of it. We decided to take a week break so that he would have a bit of a break. It also gave us the free time to get burgled.

Needless to say we weren't in the happiest state of mind when the deadline for our next comic came around. Much like Andre, Heather, and the rest of the Real World cast we decided to stop being polite and start being real. We brought our real world drama into our comic and addressed the burglary.
The comic was hastily drawn (which we apologized for in our now trademark disclaimer) and suffered from the constantly unreadable text and squished format. Coming off of our recent burglaring we had developed a strong sense that the world was against us. So we started to blame to people in charge for our lack of perceived success.

We delivered our final 3-panel comic, a fan-mail spoof with little fanfare and began to scheme how to improve the readability of our comic. We asked for a little more space and to be allowed to keep our original font to facilite an easier read. No dice. "We can't change the format of the page," they'd say. "We can't give you special treatment," we were told.

So we tried to take matters into our own hands. We switched to 4-panels instead of 3 because two panels of a four panel comic were given the same space as an entire 3 panel comic. We created the best drawn comic yet, with stronger lines and proper backgrounds. Even the writing was the best we'd done in weeks. It cleverly and self-deprecatingly spoke of our struggle to get more space. It poked fun at ourselves and, more importently, the Gauntlet.

The comic never ran.

I can only assume that our dreadlocked and humourless comics editor did not take kindly to the mild-mannered accusations levelled by our four-panelled effort. At first we thought maybe the email just got lost in the depths of the information superhighway (they were still calling it that back then) so we sent it again to no avail. After many attempts to find out why the comic had ceased running we decided that we needed to fight fire with fire.

We brought the fans into it, or at least we created a few fake accounts in the Gauntlet Forum and posed as angry fans who missed their weekly dose of Devin and Stu. Unfortunately we quickly discovered that the only people who read the forums were fake and created by us. We were finally defeated and swore that never again would we fall prey to the perils of extra curricular groups.

PROLOGUE

I stuck with the comic gig though and created a moderately successful, self-published superhero comic called The Masked Avenger. The small following of loyal fans (not to mention the money I made) helped to quell the disappointment of our original failure.

We briefly made an attempt to resurrect the original comic online, but it was too late. Devin and I were switching school and switching majors. There was no time for comics any more. The Masked Avenger ended after issue 5 (though it found a minor rebirth through the pen of Ian Urbanski) and Nerdism: The Website uploaded its last comic on Monday June 6, 2003.

If you want to invesigate further you can find some Masked Avenger comics online at http://stueypopp.deviantart.com or the online version of Nerdism at http://nerdism.comicgenesis.com/