EGG MAN - My earliest comic book attempt

My love of making comics has been with me a long time.  The earliest comic I ever made was when I was about 7 years old.

Egg-Man was his name.

When I was a kid, where I grew up there were only 2 TV channels (something I try to remind my 4 year old daughter about constantly as she asks me to change the Youtube video multiple times in one minute).  So choices were pretty limited for entertainment for kids on TV.

But every weekday in the afternoon there would be a few cartoons that would come on right before the news.

A few of the names were, Roger Ramjet, Banana man, Apple man, Henry’s Cat, Bangers and Mash.  They were usually American or British but they were fun.

So one afternoon, inspired by these cartoons, my best friend Gavin and I decided to make our own characters and make some short comic book stories with them.

All we had at our disposal for supplies and materials at the time were some black pens my Dad had swiped from his stationary room at work and notepad paper.

No one gave us any direction on how to write a story, script or a synopsis for a comic.  We just started putting pen to paper and we would draw our comics from scratch.

No one taught us about pencilling or sketching out thumbnails, we would live with our mistakes.  I mean come on, we had no idea pencilling was even a thing, we just thought this is how its done.  We would have to live with our mistakes.

Although I do remember using a lot of white-out.

My comics were usually with the idea that Egg-man, who was sort of a super hero type, would be doing something heroic.  Defeating an evil villain or saving a group of innocents on a bus from danger.

Now why on earth did I choose Egg-man as a super hero I have no idea.

Egg-man was… was, sort of a muscular character.  With a white costume and cape.  A giant E on the chest (for egg of course), and his head was the perfect shape of an egg.  

With the top half being a half cracked egg shell with two slits for the eyes and the bottom half of the eggshell missing so that it exposed the soft, shiny hard boiled white of the egg.

Oh and he had a mouth and could talk.

There was no origin story like you would get with multiple Spiderman or Batman comics and movies.  The character just was, no explanations, no reason why, he was just a man with an egg for a head and an extremely muscular physique.

I obviously hadn’t thought through the ramifications of having an egg as head for a superhero.

But it did lead to some interesting scenarios.  I vaguely remember one villain he went up against threatening to fry him.  Another situation where a giant hammer tried to smash his egg skull.  A lot of the dangers involved smashing eggs.  I don’t even remember being that into eating eggs at the time.

But something I do realise now was the interesting idea of creating a flawed character.  And how those flaws create interesting problems for the character.

Many stories, often have the invincible hero who can take on mountains of bad guys.  Or the cool character who always has the best line in the story and has all the best friends, cool outfits and so on.

It’s really easy to make our main character an idea of what we would like to see or be.  To hide behind and protect us so that we can feel comfortable.

But by making that character we can never have any conflict in their life.  Which leads to boring, uninteresting storylines and unemotional stories that don’t captivate the reader.

Problems come up and are solved in an instant.  There is no tension in the story.  We don’t feel any danger, or other uneasy, relatable emotions that make us resonate with the character. And most of all how are you ever going to have a cliff-hanger?

So when making a character for my stories I always give them some sort of flaw.

For example if I were to make an immortal, heroic superman type of character I might make his ego his flaw and see where that takes him or how it can be used against him.

If the character were the popular girl at school, maybe her flaw is that she’s deeply insecure and uses her looks and bubbly persona to hide the constant panic and anxiety that goes on in her mind that only the reader knows through her internal monologue.

Flawed characters are far more interesting.  And it’s those flaws that lead to conflict.  And it’s through conflict that you can have more interesting stories which always makes your characters more interesting too.

So think about the process of making flaws and how that can then create problems or conflicts for your characters when you make your next webcomic, short story, graphic novel, illustrations or anything else you are creating.

If you didn’t know already I am making my own webcomic “Jim Reel Paranormal Investigator”

The first short story is going to be 10 pages in length and I’ll be starting the final colour artwork very soon.

It’s a horror/action story set in the 70’s with a ghouls, goblins, witches and werewolves.  A katana wielding protagonist with an afro.

It is horror but with some of that humour that you’d find in a James Bond film from the 70’s.

Think Hellboy meets Shaft.

I’ll be documenting the process I’ll use to develop the comic so please subscribe to the comic and pass on the details to anyone you know who loves to read comics or is thinking of making their own webcomics.

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I think they’ll get a lot out of it.

Bye for now