Bobby Hughes, Born to Lose
I’m about 70 pages into the first draft of my Teenage Beast story. I envision it as a comic, but I am writing it out as a full prose story because that is simply the way it wants to come out.
As I have written before, I spend about an hour a day writing this story. That is a modest investment of time, but after a little more than a month I have done more than chip away at it. I would say I am roughly two-thirds of the way through this first draft.
My guess is that the magic is the morning ritual: waking up bleary-eyed in front of a vintage Mac mini booted into an obsolete, offline operating system, with no distractions and a hot cup of black coffee in my hand.
Most mornings I have only the vaguest idea of what I am going to write, and inexplicably it flows out of me. It doesn’t feel like invention. It feels like I am being handed something and I am simply transcribing it.
It’s a strange feeling, and I wish I had started this years ago. I think about the stack of books I could have written. Then again, maybe this is all a product of my current state of mind. Who knows?
At night I draw, and lately I have been trying to find the faces of my expanding cast of characters. If this does become a comic or illustrated story, I want characters who are distinctive, appropriate to the 1978 setting, and easy to draw and redraw.
In a way, it is like creating my own version of the Archies, but with a scratchier pen, punk rock, and some monsters thrown in.
When I originally penciled the Teenage Beast drawing, it was already 1985. It was too late for punk rock. It had been absorbed by MTV and divided into countless little categories. Punk had hardcore punk, straight edge, skate punk, anarcho-punk, street punk, pop punk, horror punk, deathrock, garage punk, art punk, and seemingly endless variations beyond that.
It became exhausting. It seemed like half of a hardcore show was people explaining what kind of punk they were.
Can I enjoy myself, or must I review your resume?
Punk was dead. It just didn’t know it yet.
Neither did I. By the mid-’80s I was already prematurely bald. Or, as my younger, hairier brother used to tell me, I had a negative Mohawk. I couldn’t pull off the look, much less the swagger. It was also tough trying to stay angry all the time.
Letting 40 years pass since I conceived of the character and retooling the story so it takes place in 1978 seems to have breathed new life into it. If I had pushed it into the mid-to-late ’80s, I think it would have felt dated. Leather, spikes, and Mohawks were already becoming a costume by then.
But a period piece set almost 50 years ago? That is much more interesting.
Below are some of the characters from the story. I won’t tell you who they are or why they are there yet. I’m still figuring that out myself. I have some ideas, and I am trying to discover them in my sketchbooks.
Click the gallery images for a larger view.
