If you’re just joining us, this is the penultimate post in a five-part series.  You can read the first, second, and third posts to get caught up.

I was on a roll.  The Book and The Book II were lots of fun to make.  I had plenty of time in school to draw these violent stick wars, so I next embarked upon World ‸^Stick War III: The Book.  In this book I decided to utilize chapters, grouping similar battlegrounds together.  I also reduced the number of armies to the following six: French, Russian, American, Chinese, Japanese, and Teenagers (yes, teenagers).  So let’s look at a couple of drawings from this era.

What you see here is the first drawing from the “Towers” chapter of the book.  As you might guess, this chapter contained drawings of stick men fighting on top of tall structures.  In this case, they are on bungee jumping towers.  You can see where I originally drew an arch-shaped bungee tower, but then erased it and went with some less-realistic towers.  There’s not much more of interest in this picture, I was kind of running out of ways to kill people.  One thing to note is how much better my drawings of people on fire got.  By this point I was drawing a person on fire pretty much the same way I might draw it today.  Here is a comparison of someone on fire in the first book versus the third book:

You can almost taste the burning flesh and hair.  Good stuff.

Next up is an image from the “Honey I Shrunk The Sticks” chapter.  I included this one to remind everyone just how funny a drawing like this was in seventh grade, in case you forgot.  I mean there is a guy riding a turd.  A turd cowboy, if you will.  (Note to self: if I ever decided to produce moviefilms of a scatological nature, I have a great title.)  You can see in this one that I again spent more time on the background than on the fighting itself.  What’s sad is that I recall sitting on the floor of the bathroom at home while sketching this out.  That’s dedication to your art.

I kind of got bored with the whole concept of W‸^SWIII:TB and ended it early.  As I recall, I didn’t do any work on it in the summer between seventh and eigth grade, and by the time eight grade started I decided I would start a new book instead.  This book would be Bookstix IV: The Next, Next, Next, Next Generation.  I’m not 100% sure, but I think the “Stick Books” to “Bookstix” title change was a reference to Southern Bell changing their name to BellSouth.  Starting with this book, I referred to the stick men in the book as “stix”, rather than “sticks.”  I don’t remember which armies there were in this book, but I know I introduced Arabian stix and a new type of alien stix (which now resembled four-armed versions of Alien).  This book actually had some sense of a story line, although I don’t think it would have won any awards.  So now let’s see summa them wars.

Here we have a battle at a satanic cult.  Which should really be viewed as having strong school spirit, seeing as how we were the Red Devils, encouraged to show “devil pride.”  You will see that Satan is wearing clothes, unlike most of my stix.  There is actually a reason for this:  Keith drew stick-wars also, and his stick men were unique in that they wore clothes.  So it was an in-joke that the devil himself was a clothes-wearing stick.  The clothes-wearing god pictured is also a reference to Keith’s stick men.  Check out the sexy orgy down at the bottom!  That’s pretty hot!  I’m thoroughly convinced that there’s nothing you can think of so perverse that a kid in middle school hasn’t already thought of it and drawn it on paper.

Tension had been brewing between my stix and Keith’s stick men, and this battle is the culmination of it all.  Believe it or not, Bookstix IV wasn’t all about Keith’s stick men, I just selected these two drawings because they were different from what you’ve seen the past three days.  It was nothing personal against Keith; I mean, I couldn’t claim he stole the idea of drawing stick wars from me, since I actually stole the idea from Kevin.  But getting back on track,  I really like this image because it’s just so incredibly violent.  Like, Quentin Tarantino violent.  I mean, a guy gets shot, bifurcating his body.  Then, while the top half of the body is flipping over, more bullets take off the head.  So you’ve got a guy with a three-part body, spewing blood all over the place.  It’s dripping off the ceiling!  And in another place, a guy is grabbed by the feet and used like a baseball bat to kill another guy.  And there’s an Arabian guy down at the bottom pulling a double Sub-Zero fatality.  Awesome!  The page after this battle was titled “aftermath of the page 14” and just contained the word “censored” written diagonally across the page in large letters.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series so far.  Tomorrow morning I’ll wrap it up with discussion of Bookstix V, my greatest work of stick violence ever.

“bifurcating” is a cool word.