Back in the awesome 1980s, when I would hang out with my buddy, Thom Shepherd, (yes, thatThom Shepherd, the hit singer/songwriter), instead of just getting together to watch a movie we would often opt to make one instead. More fun. Our senior year of high school alone we somehow found the time, while still being students with homework, preparing for college, seeing other friends and family, and living an hour's drive apart, to make twelve short films on Super 8mm together. Some animated, some live-action, some a creative mix of both. All just goofy fun.
But sometimes if we didn't have any blank movie film, or maybe it was raining or something, we would stay inside, lie on the floor, and make comics together instead. Using colored pencils, markers or anything we could find, along with some old scrap letter paper. For years prior both Thom and I had already been making our own solo comics for fun. (I've called them "My Stories" since I started around age five.) So I found it a novel change of pace to collaborate with a like-minded creative soul. We never argued and the ideas just flowed. I found I could sorta draw in his style more easily than he could mine. So with that hurdle crossed, we could both write and draw with narrative and visual cohesion. Though, I was never great at drawing cars so when the need arose he would gladly handle those panels. Sometimes, I would draw hands for Thom which he sometimes struggled with. Strangely, neither of us comfortably drew girls so usually they remained off screen or in the background of our stories.
Our magnum opus, remains to this day, incomplete, mostly written but not fully rendered. Every time we got together to work on it, it grew larger and larger, as I constantly added new scenes. Eventually life got it the way, with no more time for silly "hobbies". And so the stack of finished pages sleeps quietly in a file folder in my home office. Although as the decades flew by, and similarly-themed projects like Stranger Things, feeding on 80s nostalgia, became popular, it crossed my mind whether it might be worth it to dust it off and finish our "80s suburban fantasy epic". But where to find the time? It's a daunting undertaking. And Thom's now busy with his career and can't contribute. So it would be all up to me to finish it alone. Hmmm. That's no fun.
And, of course, when we started the comic in January 1987 it was a modern day story. But now, finishing the art for a story set 40(!) years ago would have to approached as if it were a period piece. Being conscious not to accidentally include anything incongruous. But that does add a new layer of interest to the project. It would require a little research to get the details just right.
In going through some old files I came across a handful of odds and ends and various other comics we did. In 2019, I began compiling them for a possible book. I thought maybe I'd just print a couple souvenir copies. One for me and one for Thom. So I wrote some short essays about each piece and did some clean up on a few of the rough ones, as I laid out the book in Adobe InDesign. No one was really supposed to see these originally, as we did them mostly for ourselves just for kicks.
One such clean-up was for Thom's roughed-out comic "A STORY ABOUT SOME KIDS WHO LIKED TO LISTEN TO THE RADIO". This is a prime example of what happened when Thom had a spare 30 minutes, a pencil and a single piece of paper. Is it a cautionary tale of 'beware who your friends are'? Is it a 'biting commentary on the crassness of the news media' and how we've become immune to it? Meh. I guess. But really it's a story that runs out when the paper does. That's all. No long set-up, no three act structure, no real character arcs. Just a flow of ideas leading the story teller where it wants to go. Like life itself. And then.... his mom calls out "Lunch is ready!" And with that, the characters are killed off, the volcano erupts, the bomb explodes, the universe collapses in on itself, et cetera, END OF STORY. FULL STOP. And Thom trots off to eat some pizza. It's a perfect example of how a teenage mind functions. It's not the kind of thing you would write when creating something for public consumption. It's just a fun doodle. Ya know, about murder and suicide.
No one else was ever supposed to see it.
Then along comes the internet.
Below is Thom's original 1987 rough "comic". And below that, my 2019 cleaned up version.
Fast forward to 2026 and I started thinking again about our shelved "epic". And I wondered if it might make more sense to finish it as an animated film as opposed to a comic. Utilizing modern tools, with action, sound effects and music and voices. Wouldn't that be more fun? Ugh. Here I go adding more work for myself again. Wasn't this the same problem last time?
Okay, okay. Maybe before I go jumping in the deep end. Perhaps I should do a test to determine the level of work that's actually involved in converting a visually basic comic in this primitive style to an animated film. So I figured Thom's simple two-pager would do nicely as a source. Limited characters, only a few locations, basic dialogue. And again, a story told in only TWO pages. I should be able to finish this in my spare time. Right?
Actually, YES! It took me two weeks working about an hour or so a night. And cost about $30.
The main differences between telling a story via silent comic panels (where carefully chosen illustrated "key highlights" of each 'scene' must convey the story) and a film storyboard (where you illustrate the action of a story that will unfold with the luxury of sound and time) become quite evident when deciding how best to tell the same story, yet take full advantage of the medium of video.
A few things stood out immediately. The world wasn't populated. Their were no females. (Remember?) And there's no explanation of how the police caught Roger's car so quickly after the shooting. Later that SAME DAY in fact. So... I concocted a SINGLE solution to fix ALL that. I added two "very 80s" teen girls outside the 7-11 at the payphone ('member those?) who overhear the shooting, see Roger's car speeding away and jot down the license plate via what she had on hand, (literally)... lipstick. Plus I show an insert of the girl Tony mentions in the beginning. So now the world is populated, yes with females too, AND those female have a strong direct bearing on the plot. And I even added a little sympathy from the point of view of the police that wasn't in the original story. (That probably comes from me approaching this from the perspective of a much older, if not slightly more mature, person.)
During the production I learned quite a bit about the strengths and weaknesses of the current tools. Not sure what good that'll do me as they are all changing so quickly. What was true one month is not so true the next month. And I learned that a single page of comic art is approximately two minutes of film. So will I finish our forty-year old epic? As a comic... or animation? Wait and see.
Anyway here's my little test of Thom Shepherd's throw-away "no one will ever see this" 1987 doodle comic:A STORY ABOUT SOME KIDS WHO LIKED TO LISTEN TO THE RADIO.
(Try not to be offended. The 1980s were quite obviously a different time. But you can't know where you are, if you can't remember where you've been.)
Until next time when I finally- oh wait, I gotta run... my pizza's ready.
