Seeing as how I pay professional comic artists to draw my lovely comics for me, I have often said that my drawing skills are non-existent and that I can’t draw. This isn’t actually 100% true. I can sort-of draw. But I will admit that I can’t draw sexy women, so you’ll never see me attempt to draw my own fembot comic.
I was doing some cleaning today and I opened up an old box with some stuff packed inside. Among these things was a comic that I had started to draw way back in 2002. My girlfriend at the time lived in another province, and I used to mail her funny little comics about me. This particular one never got finished because our relationship ended.
Here’s the story that the comic was going to tell. This takes place at an old job I had receiving in a warehouse for a commercial kitchen and restaurant equipment company. The characters are:
- Mike: me
- Barry: my boss, a very strange man with all sorts of issues. To quote a friend who met him once “There’s something the matter with him.” He would drink twelve 500 ml bottles of Pepsi Twist per day while he was at work, and God knows how many outside of work. To quote another former coworker: “That stuff has candied his brain”. He hated me for some reason, and he was why I eventually quit that job. I could write several blog posts about him… but just think “boss from hell” and you’ll get the picture.
- Brent: An old, racist, sexist Japanese man who loved to swear at and insult people – even customers – and needed to have one personal “victim” at work at all times. I was that victim when I first got hired, but when I drew this, I think the mantle of victimhood had been passed on to someone newer than me.
All of the dialogue in this comic is directly quoted from the people involved, and this was going to be based on a true story. I changed things around a bit, but something like this really did happen while I was working at that place.
Synopsis: A large shipment of very heavy pallets of drinking glasses and tumblers (Libby) arrives and Mike is stuck unloading it by himself again, as usual. There is no forklift here because those things cost money. Brent thinks Mike is moving too slow while Mike is moving a pallet of heavy shot glasses up the sloped floor. Brent decides to “help” by pushing the skid to make it move faster while Mike is turning the corner.
That’s all I ended up drawing. The rest of the comic was going to show the pallet going around the corner too fast and toppling over as a result, with Mike trapped under lots of heavy broken glass as a result. Then Barry was going to give Mike shit for damaging all that product.
In real life, I was training a new guy – Jamie the Fridge Dropper. (Guess what he did on his first day. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that he dropped the fridge on top of a custom salad table that was already late in arriving for the customer. Good times.) Anyway, Jamie the Fridge Dropper wanted to “help”, so he pushed a pallet of wine glasses around that corner. I didn’t get trapped under it as it came crashing down, but it sure was fun to clean up.
Well, enough reminiscing over shitty past jobs. Here’s my shitty unfinished comic “The Adventures of Scary Barry”
