Dark Nuggets and Dirty Helmets

For the past four weeks, I’ve been shoving more and more underwater artwork down all your throats, leaving Forever 16 to rot on the side of the road. This is entirely unacceptable. So to get myself back into the groove of drawing sarcastic teenagers from the ‘90s, I sketched Jocelyn and Steve going cosplaying again. This time, they’re dressed as two more of their favorite literary heroes, Tank Girl and Booga. For the record, they thought the comic books were way better than the movie.

Forever 16 went away for a while because I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what the fuck to do with it. It doesn’t work as short comic stories – I figured that out after that story with Joel working at McDonald’s sputtered out after six pages. I originally wrote that story as a series of comic strips, and trying to expand it into a full-length story with an emotional core was giving me nothing but headaches. These characters need the four-panel daily comic strip format, and they need to be set in the caustic, grungy, punkish 1990s. That's what I created them for, and that's where they work best. Which effectively stops me from marketing the series to modern comic publishers. So maybe I just won’t even try to do that anymore. Maybe Forever 16 should just be something I draw for fun, instead of something I knock myself out over trying to bend and shape and warp it into a precision-designed product intended solely to make me money. That’s what Jim Davis did, and I sure as shit don’t want to turn into him.