SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE

Another specific autobiographical detail that made its way into Serenity Rose unaltered: Despite the giant “WEIRDO” target painted on my head, nobody ever picked on me in school.

I know! I can’t believe it either! For some reason, all the other kids pretty much left weirdo Aaron alone to do his weirdo Aaron business in peace. I was friendless, sure, but undisturbed.

I understand this is EXTREMELY UNORTHODOX. From what I’ve gathered, the typical American weirdo experience typically involves frequent wedgies, smashed glasses, periodic dousing in pigs’ blood, etc. But not me, somehow. 

Of course, I saw other weirdos subjected to various brutalities during my death march through the US educational warzone. One time in middle school I went to the restroom during lunch to find about twenty boys crammed in there watching some spiky-haired creep (ALWAYS spiky-haired creeps) beat the snot out of a known weirdo.

Startlingly, I was bold enough to ask what was going on, and apparently this was something that happened regularly? Some perverse pee-wee fight club had been going on right under my nose for weeks! Every session would climax with the chosen nerd being inverted and dunked head-first into a toilet that was then flushed to give him that luxurious “swirly” hairstyle well-known to freaks of the era.

I didn’t wait to see the swirly, but I noticed the kid definitely looked MOIST after lunch that day. Other fellow dorks looked similarly moistened on subsequent days.

But never me, though. Baffling! By my own estimation, I was ten times the dork the rest of them were. None of the others even had glasses! What was going on??

To this day I’m not sure. Probably just luck? I definitely wasn’t flying under the radar… My school wasn’t big enough for radar avoidance. When your entire grade level has 60 students every one of them is the size of a B-52. The SHC’s (Spiky-Haired Creeps) could clearly see me.

Nope, I only have one theory as to how Aaron Alexovich, the dorkiest kid in school, never got a single swirly: The art thing. Unlike my fellow middle school misfits, I could draw, and my drawings made people laugh. Even the SHC’s laughed. Laughing all around! It was like having super powers. COURT JESTER super powers.

Now, obviously many a young cartoonist weirdo has taken many a beating in school over the years. In fact, “dorky artist kid getting bullied” is one of the sturdiest tropes in all of geek fiction. But somehow the formula seemed to work at my school. (Maybe because the school was so small.) I was too weird for friends, too amusing for swirlies.

Another autobiographical moment that’s probably more relatable: “Puberty was, well.”

SR 1 PAGE ONE-HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO

This is how my memory works. Is this how everyone’s memory works? Not sure! (I should probably read a book about that.)

For me, memory is a tapestry of visual and auditory fragments connected by a fairly flimsy thread of story that gets weaker and weaker as time goes on.

And that thread weakens even faster if it’s a memory I’m actively trying to suppress. Crawling into the darkest corners of my brain cave to re-string painful fragments can feel awfully claustrophobic.

Hopefully the structure of this page gives you some of that tiny cave vibe. It does make me wonder what Sera’s actually saying to Vicious here, though. What we’re seeing are her brain fragments, but what kind of verbal story is Sera sewing together from them? This isn’t stuff that Sera likes to think about, so is she being totally honest with Vicious, or are a lot of these details fluttering away?

And did these kids really have “Punkin’ Beer” on the school bus? Pretty bold dudes!

Just noticed the bully on this page has spiky hair, very much like the spiky-haired bathroom batterers in my middle school. (Some of them even had the little mullet.) I hadn’t even planned to write about those guys in the last entry, but POW! One of them suddenly appears. Like some freaky haunting.

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

Sorry for the last minute notice, but if you happen to be in the Los Angeles area this Sunday I’m doing another signing at the happiest place on earth, Dark Delicacies!

(Actually, I’m signing there whether you’re in the Los Angeles area or not. But you’re welcome to travel!)

This is a group signing with fellow spooky artists Jhonen Vasquez, Tony Gleeson, Moss Lawton, and Aidan Casserly. Good, Christmassy people one and all. And speaking of Christmas, what a great opportunity to get some cool gifts! I’ll have SHOCK CITY, IT’S NOT SCARY!, and the last ten copies of my “50’s monster movie”-style ZIM print.

Hope to see you there!

NEXT WEEK: DEAR MADDY.