Personal expression is one of those things you can swallow and repress for many years to please others but eventually something will come out somehow. My teenage years were a perfect example of this. I was a painfully shy, near mute of a child, hiding a disturbingly dark sense of humor behind sweet innocent-looking eyes. It was something I shared with almost no one – only a few special friends and family who I thought could handle it, but as with all things it began to slip out a little at a time…

I was “gifted” and going to public school – this is really just a politically correct way of saying “a child who is chronically bored of your tedious and dumbed-down curriculum.” I spent a lot of hours every day daydreaming… and those daydreams were not always about unicorns and fairies. Actually they more often stared the Kracken eating my peers, or going out to lunch in a new hat, depending on my mood. I was good at being random, really fucking random, and it wasn’t long before I started my own satirical newspaper long before the Onion or access to the internet. In it I wrote charming little stories with flashy titles like Lassie Falls Down Well; Irony Goes on Strike or Barney Killed in Most Dangerous Game or Last Surviving Hanson Brother Found in Cave Clinging to Can of Catfood. The Hanson Brothers appeared a lot. They were my Kenny before Kenny was a thing. Why was I so mean to them in particular? I don’t know. Must have been that clean Christian image… My bestie at the time confessed to me that Marilyn Manson creeped her out. Obviously I used this fact for years to make her vibrantly uncomfortable. “Hey look at that Goth boy over there! He’s fucking adorable!” And she’d cringe and I’d do it again. Oddly, despite being my best friend, she did not have an imaginary subscription to my satirical newspaper, though others did.

This was a wonderful little extracurricular for me but even my schoolwork started to get dark. I made a paper mache mask of Quetzlcoatl the Aztec winged snake god who required human sacrifice. I did reports on George Bernard Shaw to see if anyone was paying attention (they weren’t) and when all that failed to get even one laugh I started blatantly making shit up. I did reports on imaginary sea creatures who existed only in my special mind. I signed my permission slips with the name of famous authors, sometimes even children’s authors which should have been noticed. I mean I know death has never stopped Roald Dahl from inciting humor but still!

But I guess my fondest memory is of typing class where I left absolute carnage. Instead of typing, “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” a billion times over our teacher decided he’d make us into our own publishing house. He gave each student a random sentence and instructed them to write a paragraph about it. After we finished we were to switch computers and write a paragraph for the next person, eventually constructing a story by the end of class. I don’t remember what my sentence was but I do remember the paragraph after it started outlying the beginnings of a massive tele-tubby invasion of Earth. From there on I left a trail of absolute devastation at every screen. I journeyed into Candyland where I killed off people eating the chocolate roads with speeding lollipop trucks, taking my inspiration from Froggo. I got Barney the lovable purple dinosaur embroiled in some NSFW scandals. I gave Tony the Tiger some much needed therapy for his Cereal Killing and then I sat back and watched as students tepidly raised their hands to share their stories at the end of class. The best one was the computer I started on. They really ran with that tele-tubby invasion! Sadly the girl next to me was far less thrilled with my writing style and just bitched to the teacher that it was needlessly violent and she couldn’t write any more if I kept killing off the main characters mid-story. Fair ’nuff. My computer teacher was too numb to understand it was me causing all the havoc. My English teacher actively discouraged my creative writing saying I was too “slangy” and didn’t make any sense but I kept going! And here I am, in my thirties, still maintaining the inappropriate giggles of my twelve year old self while adding frog pants to The Wild and Crazy History of Condoms. When that wasn’t enough I moved on to A Brief and Delightfully Awkward History of the Codpiece.

Some of you reading may be aware I sport “tits and a twat” (my favored way of announcing my sex) so I will also include some personal and hilarious horror stories for the ladies out there. A personal favorite will always be Pop! Goes the Speculum! And if that’s not enough I also have a historically relevant piece on Killer Tampons.

**Footnote – all comics included in this are rare archival finds from my teenage years. They’re Glen the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar who I breathed life into via MS Paint and lack of sleep.