Last week Garrison tipped me off to this story about a thirteen-year-old kid who got suspended from school for drawing something that resembles a giant gun.  Seriously, is that all it takes to get suspended?  If I were that age today, I would probably be expelled.  In fact, they might send me to Gitmo and throw away the key.

I’ve decided that I’m going to devote this week to sharing some of the things that I drew at around the same age.  Beginning around the second semester of sixth grade (which is to say, early 1994, when I was 12 years old), I drew pictures of stick man wars.  This is something I continued for approximately three years, culminating at the start of the second semester of my freshman year of high school (early 1997, at 15 years of age).  During this time I completed five “books” of these drawings.

For today, I’ll leave you two pages from The Book, my first and longest book (fifty pages!).  Stay tuned as I plan to make a post each morning this week before leaving for work.

If that kid got suspended for drawing a gun, then you can imagine what they’d do if they found a drawing like this.  This was basically a catalog of all the weapons I had used or might someday use in my stick wars.  I need to give some context to the “nazi star” you see on the page, before you leave dozens of comments accusing me of being a racist:  there were many different armies in my drawings, one of which was the Nazi army.  The “nazi star” is a swastika-shaped throwing star, which the Nazi stick men would use sometime.  For the same reason you see a calculator attack (one of the armies was Nerds) and a cape smother (one of the armies was “caped crusaders”).  In tomorrow’s post I’ll elaborate on the different armies.

In my books I included advertisements, and here is an advertisement for “Bombs ‘R’ Us.”  I believe the tone of the ad was a parody of some commercial on TV at the time, that said something like “big cars, little cars, black cars, white cars.”  It may not have been cars per se, but I think there was some commercial like that.  I just changed the subject to bombs.  Check out those 10 inconvenient truths locations.  I guess I picked locations that were either (a) hard to reach; (b) devastated by war; or (c) Madagascar.  You’ll also see a reference to Sega’s pre-ESRB video games rating system.

Check back tomorrow morning for some stick wars from The Book.