One day while digging through old artwork stored at my parents house I had a sad realization: I was funnier as a kid than I am as an adult.
That statement is probably true for most grown folks. We were all at some point gap-toothed, clumsy, and gullible. But the kind of funny I am referring to is intentional. I was clever.
If you had asked me if I was a clever child about a year ago I would have told you no, that I didn’t develop a sophisticated sense of humor till adolescence. But a long-forgotten discovery in the giant stack of my elementary school artwork has made me think that the opposite might be true. I was at my peak in the 6th grade, and everything since then has been regression. That discovery was my old comic book series, The Adventures of Super Stik. I spent the better half of my 5th and 6th grade class time obsessively drawing the things. There are so many that it took me more than an hour to read them all, and after revisiting the series in completion I hung my head in shame. I was so much funnier back then.
Super Stik is a super hero in a world of stick men who, with the help of his faithful sidekick Fat Boy, fights villains of every sort, resulting in violent calamity and mangled, disembodied stick people on every page. The series started in the fifth grade as a one page strip and over time developed into a labor of love that I devoted every spare minute of class time to. The idea for Super Stik came from my friend Devin’s crudely drawn comic, “Fat Boy”, about a fat stick man who sat on people and crushed them (get it? he’s fat!). I appropriated Fat Boy and made him sidekick to my own character, and the dream team was born. Super Stik was a hit!
I had experienced childhood fame amongst my classmates for my drawing skills, but never like this. Kids hounded me to finish the next issue of Super Stik, and excitedly crowded around it upon each release. Mind you, this was probably a grand-total of 30 kids, but when you are in the same class all day every day that’s a pretty big deal. The demand for my comics made me increasingly ambitious with every new issue, and the quality of Super Stik went from a crudely scribbled one-off to carefully crafted works of art.
I’m going to occasionally post old issues of Super Stik on this site, working in order of release. But first I want to show a later-issued comic from 6th grade, because as I explained, the beginning issues are pretty archaic. This issue has all the same elements of those early issues (stick men mangling and impaling eachother, Fat Boy killing the bad guy by sitting on him) but the visuals are much more dynamic here. I’m really proud of these comics, and I hope you enjoy them now as much as you might have when you were ten years old.
In this issue, Super Stik and Fat Boy are visiting the Empire Stik Building when they are confronted by their old enemy, Robo Guy, and are forced to battle his legion of robotic minions. You can download the comic as a PDF HERE, or view the comic as one long image HERE. Enjoy.
