Larry Hughes, Born to Lose

Sketch of Larry Hughes. This one may be too dweeby to survive.

Before my monster became a monster in Teenage Beast he was a human being. I have a name for him — Larry Hughes — but I wasn’t sure what he was going to look like.

1980s Goo-Goo Muck sketch based on a guy I knew

When I was first cooking up the character back in the mid-1980s, he was based on a guy I knew who had a pug nose and vaguely resembled Kevin Bacon, but that doesn’t work for me any more. Times change and I’ve lost touch with that guy. I tried to draw him from memory, but it wasn’t working. I started anew. My character will retain the pug nose, but I am still working out his other attributes. Larry is going to be particular to the time period which I am figuring is somewhere between 1978 and 1982. He’s not a fashion plate or very good looking kid. I’m trying to picture him as every other guy I went to high school with. He’s the kind of kid who rolled out of bed and into a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt with a graphic — usually a band logo — either silkscreened or ironed on to it.

Once in school, it was a matter of surviving either the pitfalls or the acute dullness of the day. A break would come to the stultifying boredom about mid-day in the form of lunch in the cafeteria. It was like a visit to one of the nine circles of hell in that it was a deafening tumult with bad catering. Afterwards, it was a return to the stultifying boredom.

I’m still searching for Larry. I’m not basing him on anybody in particular. I keep my high school yearbook close at hand to refer to the unkempt messes that boys considered hair styles at the time and to give me the mood of that period. High school yearbooks are really excellent time machines. Movies and TV always tended to have a veneer of artificiality to them unless they were low budget. Kids in Hollywood were always too good looking, Outside of the senior portraits, yearbooks take you back to the time period warts and all.

Larry Hughes is not a particularly likable fellow. He is a sad sack but a lot of it is self inflicted. He’s the guy that becomes my Teenage Werewolf, but unlike Michael Landon who played the hapless lad beset by lycanthropy in what I consider his greatest role, Larry is not sympathetic. He was given the rhyming moniker of Larry Hughes, Born to Lose in grade school and it has always stuck. Sadly, the name fits.