The "Lost Projects"

Whatever Happened to Fanboy?
(1989-91, unfinished and unpublished)

Almost like "Whatever Happened to Doug Holverson ?" This symbolizes my "lost projects period" of the '90s. These projects included the first series InterStellar OverDrives 3, 4, and 5; the play Sisyphus Rock and Roll; D-Cup Darlings, a.k.a: Galactic Gazongas, a patent pending that fell through; Rip Off Press and Antarctic versions of InterStellar OverDrive; and Whatever Happened to Fanboy? About the only things that did see the light of day were the cartoons I did for the short lived Timber Ridge Outdoor and Adventure Magazine (and "unauthorized reproductions" ...) and a dirty apazine that I don't do anymore....

More misadventures of Fanboy plus his new acquaintance Scapegoat, as they stumble into the "Nasty '90s" Oddly enough, on the onset of the '90s, I had a humor comic, Fanboy, that became a darker vision than my science fiction comic, InterStellar OverDrive.

Fanboy now had a job doing mop up at the local nuclear plant, mirroring then current events in my life. This was before The Simpsons debuts, and later became sort of a reaction to that show, mine being somewhat based real life nuclear work versus some screen writers making it up as they went along. Although Fanboy was still very capable of playful stupidity, he was now displayed hypocritical and mean streaks, which reflected with fannish mistreatment, especially concerning the commercial failure of the first series InterStellar OverDrive. Back in '89-'90, when I was trying to launch the original indie version of ISOD, I received not as much as a phone call or post card wishing success from anyone in regional fandom. In fact, one of them called it "The Age as Tupperware" and the rest of the clique snickered along in agreement, collectively wishing failure on it. I wonder if they later had a laugh when something that I had too much heart and soul and time and money invested into it went down the tubes.

Scapegoat was a small presser, a wirehead, and a social leper with a heart of gold, although it was starting to get a bit tarnished from years of other people's mistreatment. He was an unemployed electronic technician, which also reflected my then current life. Scapegoat was forever stuck between an overbearing Muse (as seen in "The Bunny Train" another new character, looked like a caricature of an improbable hybrid of an Valkyrie, an Assyrian War Goddess, and a Myoo) and a comics fandom and prodom that refused to give him a break or recognition no matter how hard he tried, what he did or how well he did it. Scapegoat also ahead of his time because he would wear his geekiness on his sleeve, sometimes with perverse or militant pride, predicting the emergence of geek culture several years later in the computer and internet fixated late '90s.

By this time, the style in the Fanboy cartoons congealed around a big foot cartoon style that was influenced by manga, John Krickfalusi, Don Martin, and early Hanna-Barbera. This style was also used in the cartoons and illos that I was doing at the time for Timber Ridge Outdoor and Adventure Magazine.

Whatever Happened to Fanboy? was planned to collect the various Fanboy cartoons drawn since Fanboy!; The Comic Book that Comes Double Bagged plus new material, had it been completed....

Whatever Happened to Fanboy? was probably sunk because of over ambitiousness and under the weight of its own anger and rage. Some of the overly ambitious and gimmicky touches were a parody turgid, mock introduction by a fictional professor (also a character in the book) and a bookmark in the form of a radiation time card from the fictitious W. L. Skow Nuclear Plant (Wilber L. Skow was my late maternal Grandfather and an Allis Chalmers dealer ). Personal rage flared in many of the strips which tended to be confrontational instead of having a real punch line.

"Fanboy meets Mr. Fan", a long (the page count would have been in the high teens), unfinished strip that would have been the coda of the book, proved to be the problematic undoing of Whatever Happened to Fanboy?. The story involved Fanboy time traveling back to the '60s, to see if they were as "cosmic & groovie" as the then Boomer pandering media said they were, in his modified 1964 3/4 ton Studebaker Champ pickup, a parody of the Back to the Future movies. Once back in time, he was frustrated and disillusioned to meet his prototype instead, Mr. Fan, and Oink, Mr. Fan's pet pig (both rendered in a puerile second grade type style, the latter's dialog was a single "oink....", ,"oink!", or "oink?" for each and every panel that he appeared in). Once Fanboy learned of his true origins, he had a painful self awareness inflicted on him by finding out that he was merely a character in the type of very uncool small press comic that he always really hated for "not being like Marvel!"

An ending never gelling is why" Fanboy meets Mr. Fan" remains unfinished. In some versions, the trip to the ending, gets detoured into "the real world" where Fanboy meets his maker ( me ) for a spleen venting. One ending had Fanboy so stripped and deprived of friendship that he committed suicide because he couldn't take other's heartlessness anymore. Another ending (called the "wet dream ending" and merged this story with another strip) had the Muse meddling (and probably scaring or intimidating the likes of "evil" comic book publisher B.B. Boomer ) and making Scapegoat successful. One rather nasty for the sake of nastiness ending had Fanboy and clique gassing Scapegoat and making a lamp shade out of him before turning against themselves. At other extreme, another ending just had Fanboy easing up on Scapegoat and both going out together for a beer. And one ending that had Fanboy and Scapegoat traveling back and checking out the '70s; Fanboy getting to boogie at the Disco while Scapegoat gets to buy some exotic Centuri model rocket kits (especially those mint Orions ) and get friendly with a couple of my cartoon characters of the period, buxom brunette smartie Faustina Feird (who was revived and renamed as Winifred C. Feird in InterStellar OverDrive and the original butch busty blonde Winifred Feird (who was a rough predecessor for Lumpy the Amazon and, to a lesser extent, the very early versions of Flexia from the earlier Captain Saucers ).

Not getting Whatever Happened to Fanboy out caused me miss a club deadline and my United Fanzine Organization membership lapsed in the summer of '91.

What the final lethal blow to even finishing a post UFO version of Whatever out was the aftermath of a failed attempt to revive Interstellar OverDrive. After the direct market failure of the first Series InterStellar OverDrive, a revival attempt almost immediately began in 1990. This was courted by Rip Off Press, but they wanted a different artist. So I briefly partnered with a regional fan artist who had a foot in comics prodom. He failed to hold up his end of the partnership and produce the art in a timely manner (while lying to me that he had the art finished when he hadn't) and Rip Off lost interest in the spring of '91.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of being nice to him at a comics con later that summer, instead of using common sense and staying the hell away. This would explode like shrapnel in my face a few weeks later.

That fall, this ex-partner went on a lying and bad mouthing spree against me, telling any fan or pro ear that would listen and in any 'zine to which he contributed. Making a bad situation worse, regional fandom, with its herd mind, and sided with him and swallowed his BS like M&Ms.

This all went beyond insult to injury and was insane and painful on all levels. One of the major things I hate about dealing with people, is that it often lacks much cause and effect that makes any sense. I was nice to him at the con and he told everybody the opposite for reasons known only to him (my best speculation is that he wants to be the only local artist so that he alone can hog all the attention; he has slighted and bad mouthed a least a couple of other local artists since my experience). I had the maddening experience of "am I the one insane here or has everybody else gone mad?", when you had right and wrong and truth and lies and everyone around you acts like those have been wholly inverted. I had the major bruising of self esteem (which was already down and hurting over the commercial failure of the early InterStellar OverDrive, ) of not being considered worth believed and sticking up for when somebody was lying about me.

Thus the plug was pulled on Fanboy when the ham fisted parodies of unfairness that were inflicted on Scapegoat were well exceeded by real life. Their was only one strip drawn after that event, featuring Scapegoat in a jittery paranoid solo in an rare unpublished piece which was seen by less than a half dozen people.

After this major emotional kicking for the amusement of regional fandom, while I slowly picked up the pieces by going to commercial art school (and graduating at the top of the class) and overhauling InterStellar OverDrive, so that the second series emerged and was optioned, this time with my art.

In '96, I made a half baked attempt at holding out and olive branch to the ex-partner. He replied with a friendly email, while swiping a graphic from my website, bastardizing it in Photoshop, and using it on a smear page with the same old lies and bad mouthing with five years' worth of embellishment. Of course, local fandom defended his actions. Then again, since my ex-partner's first lying spree, he screwed at least two of his other ex-partners out of about $1500 each, while I did things like return a lost billfold and a lost purse, and regional fandom still solidly believes that he has much higher integrity than I. These days, I've all but washed my hands of any having hopes of getting along with fandom in these parts.

Pat Moriarity made a tongue-in-cheek mention of Whatever Happened to Fanboy in a series of comics creators' summer reading lists in a early '90s issue of Comics Journal.

take a look at a Fanboy & Scapegoat strip from Whatever Happened Fanboy
take a look at the rarely seen, unpublished "Bunny Train" sequel
skip to other lost projects