Question: What were your favourite cartoon shows, books, comics growing up?
Answer: I will split the cartoon answer into three eras: early childhood, junior/senior high, and college/young adulthood.
Early childhood: Warner Bros. cartoons, Merrie Melodies and Tom & Jerry. The classic Tom & Jerry, not the ones were the music changed and they started speaking regularly… (I think that would mean the Chuck Jones productions.) These were brilliant, even if I didn’t yet get the cultural references hidden in them. There were others in the line-up of the Saturday morning ritual, where I mummified myself in my blanket on the couch, but these are the ones that burned themselves into my psyche; these are the ones that helped shape my sense of timing and humor. Somewhere straddling this and the next era was the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, absolutely brilliant. Fractured Fairytales and Mr. Peabody were favorites!
Junior/senior high: These were the maturing subjects that began showing up on weekday mornings before the walk to school. And the Saturday line-up began including things like the X-men and Spidey and his Friends. The not-to-be-missed weekday series was Starblazers. An anime, even though this was years before I would ever hear that word. The old battleship turned space vessel with the last survivors of Earth travelling through the galaxy. This was brilliant to me.
And of all the Saturday morning shows of this period, one always stood out. Of course, I mean Thundarr the Barbarian. This aired at the same time I began drawing consistently and consciously. I believe it has influenced my fantasy mind more than any other single source. The fact that I get to meet a storyboard artist that worked on the show (that would be the irrepressible beastbriskett) is the icing on the cake that is Thundarr.
College/young adulthood: Cartoons have never left my life, even though I have walked away for watching traditional television these days. In college, the television int he fraternity house often blasted group-gathering episodes of all those Disney serials: Darkwing Duck, TailSpin and the such. Here the one catch-my-attention show was Animaniacs! OMGs! The writing on that show was genius. I would hurt from laughing so hard. This was the fine tuning I needed as a young adult in my sense of humor and how I saw the outer world, IMO. I was that sort of bat-shit-crazy in a world that wanted such things locked up in a water-tower.
Books: Through most of my youth, the books I read were most always generating by the reading lists of English class. I would say it was typical of standard school reading.
Into college, an obsession developed with the fantasy genre. It was the same time that is tarting gaming in the AD&D role-playing system. The biggest chunk was the books fo the Dragonlance series. It started with two trilogies, one about the Companions and one about the twins of the group. The series exploded from there. By the time I stopped, I had read some thirty-plus books written in the world of Krynn. I even add the Dragonlance AD&D supplement, although I never much used it, since it pretty much obliterated my preferred play class: Druids.
Comics: My foray into comic books began in junior high, but then stunted until college. I was almost strictly a Marvelophile. It begin with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four in the early 80s. In college, it was all about the mutants! Shortly there after, I realized as I read that it was due to the strong parallel that I drew between the mutant struggle and my own coming out process; being gay in the world… By the time I stopped collecting, I had assembled every Uncanny X-men since the issue by John Byrne where Kitty Pryde joined the team (139?). I had every subsequent mutant title for the first issue until I stopped, which developed out of some annoying choices by Marvel on how they handled both their characters and the availability and collectability of their comics. These were, if I recall them all: New Mutants, X-factor, X-force, Excalibur, X-men and prehaps just a few starting issues of Generation X.
At the very end, things like ElfQuest popped into the collection. And Marvel’s non-Marvel Universe title, Strikeforce: Morituri absolutely fascinated me… At the peak of all of this, I had, I think, three to five thousand comics. The oddest thing about it. If you were to show me the cover art of any issue I owned, I could tell you the story content and any cross-over characters involved… I had even started doodling part of the cover art onto the back of the backing boards for my favorite issues.
*whew*
Another awesome question!
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