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Before BOHICA: The Drive to "Make A Story"
🕑 Added 2020-04-17 16:00:06 +0000 UTCIn the world of webcomics, there are two primary types of comics: the "long-form story" and the "gag-a-day" format. Obviously, the "long form story" establishes characters, a time line, events from past comics build towards events in future comics, and there's more or less some continuity and actions have lasting effects. Stories, of course, can be funny to serious, slice-of-life, or dark. Characters *usually* grow and change, although that is not always the case.
"Gag-a-day" comics are typically stand-alone comics, the joke is here today, gone tomorrow, and rarely do events refer back to past events. Characters may undergo life-changing or even life-ending events, only to re-appear in the next comic as if nothing ever happened.
There are a lot of people out there that just cannot hold a story, and they do "gag-a-day" comics. Maintaining a story and plot is a lot of work and requires a creator to pay attention to things, whereas there's a certain freedom to gag-a-day comics where you don't need to worry about the consequences of prior decisions or actions.
I loved gag-a-day comics and admire the creativity that goes into them. Stuff like "The Far Side" stands out and is a favorite to this day for many fans. To me, though, no matter how hard I try to just relax and do gag-a-day comics, I just can't. To me, *those* are the hard ones. Telling a whole story in one or two panels and then turning it loose with no thought to what happens next is something I can't seem to do. Even when I *try* to make gag-a-day comics, I end up slowly, inevitably, making stories out of them.
So it was with this "MP Sharilee" story I made many, many years ago, long before the creation of BOHICA Blues. Quick recap: I was in the US Army on Active Duty and I had a comic I would put up every few days on the Company bulletin board. It was typically called "Joe Rock" (who eventually became the main character in the "BOHICA Blues" webcomic, but at the time there was no thought about formalizing him). Not content with just "Joe Rock" the Infantry soldier, I also made a Soviet soldier (this was late 1980's) named "Josef Rockovitch" and a female soldier named "MP Sharilee".
I wanted to have a female character but knew nothing about what female sin the Army did, so I put her in a Military Police (MP) unit since at the time that was the closest that women could come to being in combat units. Most women were in administrative units, and I had never held an office job at that time so I had no idea about the possibilities for office humor, and in my young mind at the time the very idea that anything amusing could happen in an office was beyond my ability to comprehend (offices, in my mind, were where dreams went to die).
For some reason, I just could not help it-- I had to make stories out of my characters. They had to GO somewhere, BECOME something, and move beyond the limits of the daily panel borders. Things had to progress towards something, otherwise I felt like my efforts were being wasted. I started introducing recurring elements to some of the comics but eventually just broke down and made a full story, or at least a four-part arc, which I found immeasurably satisfying.
The post I was at (Fort Carson, Colorado) had a reputation for not just bad chow at the time, but for closing multiple chow halls and making troops choose between long migrations t over-crowded chow hall facilities on post, or dipping into their personal accounts to go get (or order in) food from the commercial market. I came up with the idea of the Military Police crashing the chow hall and exposing hidden horrors therein, much of this influenced by the then-infamous Geraldo Rivera live TV special about finding and breaking into Al Capone's vault in an excavated basement in Chicago. The live-TV event was much-hyped but as it dragged on and on it became dull, then farcical, as Geralsdo tried to keep the excitement going with over-awed and breathless announcement about shovelfulls of dirt being excavated. When they finally did find a vault that may or may not have been Al Capone's, it was a huge letdown and it was hours of TV time no one could get back.
Another influence was a childhood/adolescent years favorite of evening TV, the "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" show, in which Marlin Perkins --in pith helmet and Indiana Jones type outfit-- would go out into the wild and follow a wildlife crew as they shot animals with tranquilizer darts, then rushed in to tag them, weigh them, record statistics and put radio tracking collars on them before they woke up and stumbled off. The show was pretty good and I enjoyed it, even though even at my young age the over-amped narration was as humorous as it was informative. Marlin's voice-overs as the big burly wildlife zoologist "Jim" wrestled with anacondas or lions or whatnot was more like a sportcaster calling out every swing of a golfclub on a muggy Florida green. But it was great fun and I enjoyed it, and it has been a theme I returned to a number of times over the years.
As for this short story, I posted the first four comics and I know I wrote "more follows" in faded pencil below, but darned if I can find the rest of these old comics. Most of these old "pre-BOHICA" comics are on yellowed old typing paper, faded and crumbling, sent to me by a friend who had collected them and kept them over the years before re-discovering them and mailing them to me. Some of them aren't even legible any more and appear to be faded copies of copies of copies from early Xerox copiers.
There is a running story of the Soviet soldier, "Josef Rockovitch", that will be posted eventually, but for now I'll start with these. I'll make them publicly available as well, while the other comics will be shared as usual with Patrons. Those at the "Sergeant" tier of course are still getting the last of the 40-chapter "Empires" sci-fi drama which will be wrapping up very soon (about mid June I believe).
As a side note, it is interesting to recall that I used to sign these comics under the pen name "Kelly G. Brannon", who was also a character in later BOHICA Blues stories as well as a character in his own series of titular spy comics that explored the absurd side of over-the-top spy technothriller genre. Expect to see some old "Kelly G. Brannon" comics in the future as well at the "Classic Comics" tiers.
Until later, I hope you enjoyed this look at my early comic storytelling, and until next time-- stay safe out there.
