MY EARLY WORK

By Jonathan Wojcik

   I've been drawing bugs and monsters since long, long before the internet was a thing. These are just a few of the silliest, nerdiest and oddest I've unearthed since.

This is probably the oldest drawing from my youth that I've found to scan. It was drawn immediately after viewing the first quarter of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi" and depicts a background story for Bubo, whose name I didn't know at the time. It actually reads from the bottom right to the top lift, and goes as follows:

1) Bib Fortuna (Jabba's tentacle-necked pal) arrives at the front door to the palace with a mysterious, wiggling bag. He is greeted by the robotic eye. Somehow I noticed at the time that the door had a carving of a bat. It's odd what sticks out to you as a child.

2) Bib drags the bag through the halls of Jabba's Palace while two members of Yoda's race look on. Yoda is one-of-a-kind in the original films, but I guess I just really wanted there to be a bunch more living with Jabba.

3) (entire top half of drawing) Fortuna arrives in Jabba's courtroom to show everybody what he found - it's Bubo! Having been caught from the wild, the frog-dog can now live in the palace and be everybody's friend!

Notice that Yoda himself is also hanging around in the palace - in a tree - and a hilarious, scrawny Darth Vader is the first to greet a gigantic, long-limbed Bubo. The three-eyed alien, Ree-Yees, is looking on in the foreground, and the red guys with spears are supposed to be the Emporor's royal guards.

This boat is in a BIG JAM, guys!!! I'm not sure why I decided there needed to be turtle-fish hybrids attacking a boat when they coul just as easily have been crocodilians of some sort. Notice that the dialog is reflected in the water.

This is actually the "cover" to an "activity book" I seem to have created, which consists almost entirely of the same few characters with dotted lines around them and instructions to "CUT OUT AND PLAY!!!" I'm not sure why fish land is being presented by crab land, but it's good to know these drastically different communities can maintain peace.

Even in first grade, I insisted on monstrifying everything I could. We were supposed to make paper plate leprechauns for Saint Patrick's Day, but that was boring, so I made this thing. I was mildly scolded, but they still hung it up with everyone else's leprechauns.

This first-grade story assignment continues on the back of the paper, but I didn't bother scanning it since it's only writing. Here's the exact transcript:

"he flew here he flew there he built a trap But it did not work! so he had a Plan... it was to set a huge trap it was a lader (sic), a Bowling Ball rolled Down the lader to hit the knife to cut the rope to trap the monsters moth man safed (sic) the city from the monsters the end."

I don't know where I got the idea for these eye-lined creatures, but I remember being seven years old when I drew this. Seeing it through the eyes of a jaded internet user, it looks blatantly sexual. Thanks, internet.

The vaguely eligible writing tells me this was probably made towards the end of my kindergarten period, but I had probably already learned some crude writing from my beloved collection of zoology books, in particular the "Little Golden Guide to North American Insects," which I carried with me damn near everywhere. It was from this lovely little book that I developed my earliest understanding of taxonomy and the relationships between different species.

In this chilling scene of life and death, a couple of ladybugs threaten to devour an ant colony's beloved aphid friends. In the real world, Ladybugs are fairly brutal predators of these tiny plant pests, which many ants farm as "cattle" for their sugary excrement.

The savage ladybugs never suspected that the ants would be on friendly terms with one of their own deadliest predators, an ant-lion or "doodlebug!"

Krang was my favorite character on the original "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" cartoon show, so much so that I've written about him twice. I found him extremely sympathetic as a kid, and vividly remember drawing this image to make the Turtles appear mean. They're throwing him up in the air just for laughs, while hot-ass April O'Neil sadistically films his humiliation and Shredder fails to hear his cries for help. Afterwards, the turtles throw a big pizza party while looking like big, fat douchebags.

My interpretation of the film "Gremlins" summed up thusly: "Gizmo never went through the stage where he turns into a lizard."

"Legend of Zelda" fan art featuring the "Leevers;" cactuslike monsters who were described by the game's manual as living underground and feeding on "power." I misread this as feeding on *power* from the ground, hence the "POWOR" flying into their mouths here. They didn't even have mouths in the game's official art.

I don't remember who it was or why, but I do remember creating this picture because I thought it would scare someone I was angry with for some small child reason.

I was mortally terrified of blood during my early years. Just the sight of it. Just a drop. Drawing it myself didn't bother me, but to see a character on television get the slightest red scratch, even a cartoon character, would send me crying and gagging from the room. It would ruin my entire day. I seriously just couldn't conceive of anything in the world more singularly horrifying than blood where it doesn't belong.

I have no idea when this finally ended, but I actually do remain a bit squeamish and can't watch things like the Saw films. About the only gore that never bothers me is in films from the 80's and earlier.

You're looking at "the Princess" and her friend "the Monster" using a mousetrap to catch themselves a pet ghost. I also left myself a note to "coler" it later, which I never did.

These are quite possibly my earliest original characters. I don't know how old I was, but I can distinctly remember that "the monster" was supposed to resemble a particular piece of mossy driftwood from the front yard, which had knots resembling large, black eye sockets. It seems the best I could illustrate this was some sort of hairy slug.

Because I was apparently into subverting stereotypes back then, the monster was best friends with a fairy-tale style princess. They loved each other like siblings, and adventured around her kingdom collecting more monsters to be friends with. I don't know where any other drawings of them went, but I do remember they added a skeleton, a giant bat, a giant spider, and a slimy blob to their gang. I also remember that the princess would have to rescue them all the time from bigger monsters or "mean people" and was an accomplished fighter. I think one of the last drawings was an epic, dialog-free comic wherein the Princess and all the other creatures had to save The Monster from a maze of deadly traps.

I think the monster may have also been partially based on the polyps from Disney's The Little Mermaid, though that would make me six years old when I drew this, and I'm fairly sure I was more advanced at drawing and spelling by that age, so my memory might be confused any number of ways.

Sometime in first grade, my teacher gave the whole class these pieces of paper and told us to write letters to "anyone we want." For whatever reason, I opted to write a letter to "scientists" asking for assistance with my work on "scorpions." I was even so bold as to begin and end my request with my first name. Now that I've found the letter in an old drawer, I realize the scientists never even received it. It's never too late...