I started this as a Too Much Information Tuesday journal, but grew up as a different beast...
Pinton the Pig is not my first character. Before that I had one named simply “the ball” which was... wait for it... A ball with hand and feet and a face! I know, it was a pretty minimalist design but c'mon, I was like 3 at the time.
The Ball was female and wore a hat with 3 flowers on it. She didn't last very long because it was a pretty boring character.
The Ball was always drawn on profile so only one leg showed all the time. This was probably because of my Egyptian ancestry, or just because I sucked at drawing. When someone told me The Ball was missing a leg I decided to upgrade the character.
The Pig was created basically adding a cylindrical nose and two ears to The Ball.
I made my first “comic book” when I was around 4 and it had about 6 pages I had stapled together. I remember every word. It was pretty simple and lacked much character development. The Pig was just eating a rotten fruit and was startled by thunder. He ran as it started to rain and found a cave. After the rains topped the Pig came out and ran around happily.
All the adults around me told me it was an incredibly well done comic and that I was very intelligent for my age. That was not completely true but I believed it and it ruined my life forever. Since that moment all I wanted was to make more comics and receive more praise.
Of course it took me some time to realize that there are more things in life than drawing comics about a pig and receiving praise for it. But by the moment it was too late, my brain became hardwired that way and I can't experience satisfaction doing anything other than drawing comics about a pig and showing them around. It was cute when I was a little boy, but now I'm a grown man whose only source of gratification is drawing comics about a pig.
When I was around six started telling everyone that some day I would built an actual pig. I was extremely serious and solemn about it and I believed it to be possible in my heart. It would be some sort of robot pig and it would be able of do impossible things one of which was “to bend the water coming out of a faucet at a 90 degree angle”. I have no idea why that specific feat was necessary and important, but I was very obsessed with it.
I looked at adults straight on their eyes very gravely and told them “I will build a pig that bends the water”. That's around the same time adults started to find me creepy.
The name Pinton doesn't have any particular meaning, I just put together two random syllables and liked the way is sounded. Pin-Ton. It was kind of musical.
Pinton was a regular pig in the first few comics but soon became an inventor and adventurer. Those early comics consisted on Pinton building some kind of absurd vehicle out of junk and using it, often crashing and gruesomely injuring himself in the process. His first successful vehicle was a helicopter he used to travel to the moon. Some time later I found out that was scientifically impossible and felt enormously embarrassed. I destroyed the comic and since then I developed the habit of burning my comics from time to time, which I still do.
My character Gordifito is not actually named Gordifito.
In his early appearances he was called “The gordifito” implying that's the name of his species.
I remember the exact moment I created him. I was at school doodling random things on a paper and it just came out in front of me. It's the only of my characters whose design has not changed in 37 years. It was perfect the first time.
Later I added more characters of his species with long names all ending in “fito” like “Rophohistamfito”. Older specimens of his species had small horns and bat wings, which made them demons. He was supposed to be a defective or undeveloped case.
I created Dr. Jlax Mlox after watching Star Wars.
The original story where the character appears had a few parallels with Star Wars including Jlax Mlox having spent many years in seclusion after an old friend had betrayed him and joined the enemy army. At the end they meet and have a final duel, except my version of light sabers were cylindrical maces with spikes they use to bludgeon each other. When the spikes made contact with the opponent they discharged high voltage current. At the end Jlax Mlox electrocutes his rival who turns into a pile of dust on the floor. The original reason for their rivalry had been the other guy ran away with Jlax Mlox's girlfriend. Jlax Mlox had built a robot version of his girlfriend which was indistinguishable of the original except for Frankenstein style bolts on her head and ran on AAA batteries.
That comic was named “The revenge of Jlax Mlox” and was done long before Star Wars even had a sequel. Curiously the third Star Wars movies was originally planed to be named “The revenge of the Jedi”.
The name Jlax Mlox doesn't mean anything either, but I clearly remember I wanted to use combinations of consonants that didn't exist in real life to make the name more alien.
The female robot in my current comic is a re-imagined version of the original robot who was called “Fexinchy”. Again, the name was just random.
Fexinchy was male and had a round body with no head and eyes on top. He had a problem with overheating when he was exited which made his electronic brain explode. He was also attracted to human females which became a recurrent joke with a sexy girl walking by and the robot turning around and blowing up. Every time he exploded old style vacuum tubes would fly around.
That character didn't last long because he was mostly useless.
At one time I decided all my characters would be married.
Pinton's wife was named Rosita and she was an exact replica of him except she had a pink bow on the head to show she was female.
Gordifito's wife was named Denis and was also identical to him but she had a blond wig.
Eventually I eliminated the wives and went back to the original cast.
Flekm was another character that appeared around 1980. He also started as one of a species. They had a distinctive civilization where everything was made of spheres connected by tubes. They were technologically advanced but totally pacifist and incapable of violence so their planet was constantly invaded by their enemies, the Dfraktrox and needed Pinton to save them.
The Dfraktrox were a warrior species, basically the opposite of Flekm's people and obsessed with conquering the universe. They were shaped as porcelain insulators with tentacles. They had gravity ray guns that would multiply the weight of whatever they shot. So if you got shot by them you would suddenly weight a million tons and you would sink all the way to Earth's core leaving a smoking hole on the ground.
Another character was Sblakion the Blonsoloxio. The Blonsoloxios were flat disks with spider legs on the bottom and a giant eyeball and a single tentacle on top. Their planet was also target of the Dfraktrox. They were able to fight but had no technology at all.
Eventually Flekm's people and the Blonsoloxios joined and defeated the Dfraktrox in an epic battle with ended with Sblakion (who was the only of his species with the ability to fly) dumping a nuclear bomb right on top of the head of the Dfraktrox king. The Dfraktrox are destroyed leaving a huge crater and Sblakion returns with severe radiation poisoning because he was still close when the nuke exploded. Of course he is saved by Dr. Jlax Mlos. I haven't used that character again.
The Blonsoloxios' planet also had a species named Aragnuphas, which were a distant relative of them. The Aragnuphas had a similar body structure as Blonsoloxios but they had only three legs and were covered in black hair. They had an intelligence similar to a dog and could be domesticated to as beast of burden. In one comic Pinton is lost in the desert and tames a wild aragnupha to carry him around like a horse.
After the war the Flekm people moved to the planet Grallo which was a replica of Earth in the Cretaceous period (an excuse to draw dinosaurs) and their entire culture became centered around a yearly car race around the main continent of their planet. The main difficulty of the race was the dinosaurs attacked the cars all the time. The race course also included a desert and a volcano areas with extra dangers.
Pinton becomes one of the drivers of the race and competes against his evil twin Loxue.
Yeah, for some time Pinton was divided into a good and a bad pig. He looked exactly like Pinton except he wore big round glasses. Loxue was obsessed with prove he was smarter than Pinton and kept challenging him to all kinds of competitions.
In another story they have another race in lightweight cars that used blood as fuel. The contestants had to stick needles to their necks that connected their circulatory system to the engine which had living muscles in the place of pistons. The blood fed the muscles and returned to the driver depleted of oxygen so the competitors would become tried as if they were running on foot. Loxue tries to cheat by shooting a harpoon to a dinosaur and harvesting it's blood. The dinosaur becomes enraged and steps on Loxue's car smashing it.
Eventually I killed off Loxue because I realized Pinton didn't need an evil version of himself. He was more interesting having both good and evil sides in himself.
That's one thing I always had present even from my earliest comics. Pinton was never a typical hero. I always hated the simplistic heroes in kids' stories. They were always perfectly good, without any flaws and that was boring. I always made Pinton flawed, he would fight for a good cause but he would fight dirty if necessary, he would help others but he would accept a payment for his trouble. He would be gluttonous and lecherous.
Another thing that bothered me is heroes in comics or cartoons never killed anyone. I asked adults and they told me “because they are good”. So I wanted to know what happened to the bad guys after being defeated and I was told they repented and became good guys. I always found that unrealistic. In my comics if there was a war there was a pile of mangled corpses at the end. Pinton would respond with equal force, if someone was trying to kill him he would shoot back and blow his head off.
Once my parents saw some particularly gruesome gore scenes I was drawing and took me to a psychologist. Some time later I was taken to an exorcist. Neither of those was very useful.
That was the period of greatest creativity in my life. Between 10 and 12 I filled a 40 page notebook of comics in a week. I accumulated several piles of them. Episode after episode of adventures.
I mostly used pencil and color pencils. Later I started using ballpoint pens because the pencil drawings faded with lots of handling. Some times I joined several notebooks into big ones for long stories.
I remember that I was not alone. Lost of other kids drew comics. But very few had the obsession I had. They would draw a couple of cartoons and get bored fast.
It went by fads. I remember the first big fad was Kung-Fu. When Bruce Lee movies became popular every kid was trying to draw him fighting a bunch of bad guys. I never got into it. The only time I drew Kung-Fu stuff was as a parody, I never liked the concept of martial arts. Also at that time I had just discovered Lovecraft and was absolutely in love with his universe, so the only story where Pinton appears using a pair of nunchakus took place in an ancient city that had surfaced from under the ocean and he uses martial arts to fight some CIA agents involved in a conspiracy to weaponize the Old Ones.
The other big fad was Anime. By that time Japanese cartoons with giant robots were all the rage and every kid started to draw in Anime style. Everyone drew characters with big eyes. I loved anime and loved the style, but I knew I was not good at it. My few attempts at drawing sexy anime girls were disastrous and I gave up. I adopted lots of concepts and ideas and I still have lots of influences form Anime, but I never tried to blatantly copy the style.
Of course, those old stories were pretty naive and the drawings were crude. But it was fun to make them, it was the most satisfying time of my life as an artist.
As I grew I lost most of that that. My art became slightly better, but I could not make them as fast as before.
As an adult I kept drawing but now I had to go by rules. The short time I published my comics professional I had to change many things to make them acceptable for the public. I could not use all the cartoonish violence and gore. I hated working for others. I had to tone down everything, I had to make Pinton a totally correct, noble, boring hero instead of morally ambiguous adventurer. And I had restrictions of space, forcing me to make short one-joke strips instead of complex storylines.
Now that I publish by myself on the Internet I have recovered some of the original grotesque style of my old work. But I can't replicate the spontaneous charm of those childhood comics.
I still draw lots of stories that go nowhere and get burned. I still sketch a hundred characters with weird names and spend half the time daydreaming about epic space sagas but I rarely finish a project.
I have never been a good artist but I know my weaknesses and try to work around them, I draw what works for me and avoid what doesn't. I know I'm not bad at telling a story. I have the knack for making the story flow from one panel to the other and make the reader understand what's going on, even if there are no words. But I need that energy I used to have.
In a couple of weeks I will be 49 and I have spent the last few decades trying to recapture that feeling. I still enjoy drawing my comics and posting them here, but I would give anything to be that unstoppable comic-making machine I was at 12.
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7 years, 1 month ago
21 Mar 2017 11:07 CET
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