Tag: Comic Relief

One of the first things me and Francois did upon moving to the Bay Area was take a trip to the large Sanrio Store in Downtown San Francisco. We weren’t total weebs but we were into a lot of anime and manga and Francois especially had a weakness for cute stationary. Chococat was a fairly new character at the time, having only debuted in 1996, and Francois was drawn to a particular stationary set because it contained these things called “friendship cards”.

These are small printed cards where you can write your name, phone number, address, birthday and hobbies then hand them out to people you want to be friends with. Did we actually think that if we handed these things to cool looking people we met at shows, record stores or other events they would become friends with us? I’m pretty sure we actually did. I can’t remember if we ever even got our phone turned on but I do remember spending the last few months at the Japanese house without power.

It’s humorous to imagine an actually friendship motivated person holding one of these colorful gingham cards and cheerily walking up our driveway only to find us throwing darts at each other in the dark. Unless they wisely crept away before we could even notice them this never actually happened. We handed out every single one of the cards but none of the recipients took us up on the invitation to become friends.

We were all super interested in underground comics and although we hadn’t moved to the area for this reason we did know that several of the big names lived in the area. We went to the address from the Eightball letters column only to find a mailbox spot on Shattuck Avenue. We tried to case the spot whenever we came to the neighborhood but never seemed to catch sight of Daniel Clowes. We searched the white pages for every cartoonist we had heard of and actually did find a listing for Phoebe Gloeckner.

I think it was Jonas who picked up the phone and dialed but Francois and I were probably sitting by expectantly. The conversation was short and extremely awkward: probably something to the effect of Yes I am the cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner How did you get my number? Oh I should probably change that. Considering that her most famous work, the recently published A Child’s Life And Other Stories, was mostly about childhood sexual abuse an unsolicited phone call from a random male fan must have felt extremely suspect.

Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve had recently been picked up by Drawn & Quarterly and had made a big splash at the San Diego Comic Con either earlier that summer or the year before. I can’t remember if we had seen him in person at this event, seen a photo somewhere or it was just that he really looked the way that he drew himself. Out of all the cartoonists he was actually popping up at the shows we went to and I noticed him at San Francisco’s Bottom Of The Hill for the incredibly geeky Servotron and Man or Astroman? show.

This was actually our third or fourth sighting as we had been seeing him around Berkeley in the Amoeba and Rasputin record stores and the then popular Landmark California Theater. I noticed that he always seemed to be wearing the same shirt: an avocado green argyle thing that loosely fit into the ‘50s retro trend of the time that was showcased in movies like Swingers and Tree’s Lounge. I approached him at the concert with the following completely friendly and non-confrontational icebreaker:

“Don’t you ever change your clothes Tomine?”

He responded by staring at the ground and quickly shuffling away. Or maybe I half mumbled it and he never actually heard me, I do remember spending the whole night working up the nerve to say it. If I could advise my younger self I would probably suggest something more like “Hey! You’re Adrian Tomine right? I really like your comics!” but at the time my brain hadn’t developed anything like common sense for this particular type of situation.

We spent a lot of time in the now defunct Comic Relief store on Shattuck and I ended up at was probably the 1999 WonderCon in the Oakland Convention Center and Marriott. I don’t remember Francois or Jonas being here and because we were all equally interested in comics it seems likely that I ended up here by pure chance because I would use the 12th Street Bart Station to return to the East Bay from San Francisco State. I probably saw people with the badges on and was able to convince a leaving attendee to give me theirs so I could run upstairs and check it out.

I met a group of young cartoonists working in the hand made black and white mini comic format. I don’t think I had seen any of their work before. I introduced myself on the pretext that I could use my job to help them make free or reduced cost photocopies which would have almost certainly been impossible to make good on. The owner of Metro Publishing didn’t actually own the machines but leased them from a company called Ikon Solutions that charged a fee for every page produced. Even if I had run comics for somebody while he was out of the shop he would have noticed the discrepancy on the internal counters.

The one person I remember talking to was Ron Regé, Jr. I was just looking into the timeline of his work and his first big published book Skibber Bee Bye didn’t come out until November of 1999 so he would have just had some mini comics. Something must have clicked between us or he just liked my energy and enthusiasm but he ended up coming by the house or giving me a ride home. At that time the lot that now holds Berkeley Bowl West sat empty and we referred to it as “the bayou”.

One of the buildings bordering the lot had a big sign that said St. Onge & Associates and Ron mentioned that his then girlfriend Dini was the daughter of the head of that development company. He saw that we were living like crazy people – no power, no roof, weird games and left. Not long after me, Francois and Lil Four broke into that building and came across a fancy office decorated with handmade paper kites. We stole a few of them and tried to fly them on the bayou where the wind promptly ripped them to pieces.

It’s not that we broke into the building because he said it was connected to his girlfriend’s father, we just spent a lot of our time breaking into buildings. The day that our next door neighbors moved out we snuck into their now empty house after dark and brought home the television. It turned out to be broken but what I’m getting at is that we never actually had one. Lil Four brought a record player but a typical night for us was spent burning a mattress, dropping a bowling ball off the nearby Orchard Hardware water tower or breaking into cars in the tow yard next door.

I did end up seeing Ron again either at a comic/music related social function or we had exchanged phone numbers. I just remember what I said to him:

“Hey I broke into your girlfriend’s father’s office and stole some of his handmade kites. We tried to fly them but they just fell apart.”

He said that while that was the name of his girlfriend’s father’s company he didn’t think that wherever we stole the kites from was actually his office. The point is that I didn’t say this as a challenge or provocation, I thought that I was just making conversation. It’s weird because I’ve had these memories for close to a quarter century now and this is the first time I’ve realized that I am completely incapable of identifying with or understanding this past behavior.

It would make sense to me to have told him about the kites to fuck with him or to have kept it a secret because it might have pissed him off but I really don’t understand volunteering the information for no reason whatsoever. What did I think? that if he was having dinner with his girlfriend and her father and it happened to come up that some kites had been stolen from his office Ron could then say “oh my friends stole those. they live in a house with no roof and don’t have power and spend their time breaking things” and this all would be just normal and pass the potatoes?

I don’t actually have any idea what I thought except that my memory tells me I was just sharing some potentially interesting information about a mutual acquaintance and the emotional affect was completely neutral. This can’t be true though, somewhere on some level there has to be some aggression. When I said the thing to Adrian Tomine about his shirt I know that it was aggression and it was coming from a place of social awkwardness but me and Ron were already friends.

If you haven’t read a whole bunch of my pieces you might not understand why I’m fretting so much over this small and seemingly trivial detail but my more faithful readers should be aware that I have a certain relationship with memory. I view it architecturally, like a thing I live in, and I want to be able to stick an arm out and feel a wall and then stick the other arm out and feel the other wall. When I learn that something was different or a detail doesn’t fit it makes me uneasy like the dimensions of a familiar room have shifted.

I’ve gone through that a couple of times with material details but now I’m going through it with the emotions that go along with details. It’s like if you’re reading a book where a character does bad things but it’s written in a way so that you can identify with those bad things like “oh he wanted to cause this horrible disaster to bring about world peace” like the Ozymandias character in Watchmen. I wasn’t expecting to come across memories where my own motivations are completely mysterious and inscrutable and I can’t rewrite it in a way where I do understand those motivations because then it wouldn’t be true.

I would almost worry that this level of dissociating from my past self is a sign of early dementia and serious cause for concern but I’m almost positive that the near exact opposite is true.

That if I could actually understand why I casually told Ron about stealing those kites then that would be a cause for concern and the fact that I can’t means that I’ve been extremely lucky. Like if I was looking at a bullet hole in a wall that didn’t end up hitting me and thinking to myself:

“Three inches to the left. If it was just three inches to the left it would all be over…”