Old / Unfinished Comics
A very long time ago, Six AM Comics wasn't a personal website, nor was it a title I went by. Instead, it was a collaborative project between three good high school friends. I won't' sugar coat it; we were just trying to be the next Penny-Arcade and failing miserably at it, but we had a fun time regardless. We even created some halfway decent content along the way. Our greatest achievement was a web comic named East Valley that documented our lives as fictional characters growing up in a New Hampshire town named, you guessed it, East Valley. The three of us all shared writing responsibilities, and I handled the illustrations.
The series can be dissected into three acts...
Act I - Dawn of Six AM
It begins with Stan, Kal, and Jason as small children trying to be successful filmmakers with an IP named Refrigerator Man about a serial killer who teleports through household appliances. This section of the series focuses mostly on childhood innocence and imagination. reminiscent of something more like Calvin & Hobbes or Muppet Babies, where a strip will often begin with something fantastical and end with the real-world reveal of what's actually happening. I never said it was the most original series ever created. The concept, however, is less about daydreaming and more about three creative types who have a vision for their work and what the final product should be, only to come crashing back down to reality to find they're just children trying to make home videos without a budget.
Act II - Scholars
After entering varying cheat codes on a test, the three 'warpzone' through life and become college students, where the series follows them through a very surreal look at life at a fictional NH university. This is the section that takes up the meat of the series. It ranges from really generic college humor to absurd surrealism. There are a handful of running gags throughout the strips: roommates who end up being video game characters that die moments after introducing themselves; an iced tea dispenser that's secretly a campus pimp; and Jason frequently challenging Stan to hand games (like Rock, Paper, Scissors, or a thumb war) and losing in ridiculous fashions. I would best describe this chunk of the series as a sea of mediocrity with a few gems sprinkled in.
Act III - Got Apocalypse?
Ultimately, their school triggers the apocalypse when it constructs a golden statue of its mascot, a cow named SheMoo, and invokes the wrath of God. The remainder of the series documents their lives living in a sewer with the survivors and generally being terrible people. This is where everything just gets weird, mainly because at this point I was writing the series by myself and just horsing around rather than taking it seriously anymore. Ironically, this is the only portion of the series with an actual storyline and a conclusion. Sadly, one of the punchlines was a cultural reference that was outdated before it even finished (remember when Justin Bieber, tweens, and Selena Gomez were a thing?), but it holds a special place in my heart. Also, I'm just going to go ahead and preface this entire act with the disclaimer that it might be the most biblically unsound interpretation of the end of days ever conceived.
You can read these at your own risk. They are the definition of 'hit or miss'. Sometimes it helps to see where you've come from to appreciate where you're at now. For what it's worth, I'm proud of this series, but I'm fully aware of just how amateurish it really is.
Ah, student film. No matter how much you try to break the mold, you're always humbled years later when you look back at your artistic vision and see... art house crap. Luckily, this was the artistic vision of my good friend, but it almost doesn't matter because, although it was his film, I was the one on camera acting a fool. And I use the term 'acting' very loosely. Six, why are you talking about no-budget student films on your "comic" page? Well, I'm glad you asked. This particular unfinished comic was an attempt to salvage a very college-esque movie that had ideas deserving of something better than a cheap school rental camera and a pirated version of Final Cut Studio.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you "Damascus," the story of a boring, straight-edged nobody who finds himself teetering on the line between sanity and psychosis while attempting to escape two maniacal clown-faced assailants. As I stated, this wasn't a concept I created; rather, it was the film project of my good friend, and he needed somebody to look like an idiot on camera for him, and I was just the man for the job. When all was said and done, he did the best with what he had, but I know he was never really happy with the end result. So I decided to reinterpret his vision in a medium that isn't bound by budget and schedules: the indie comic. Much like an indie comic, I never finished it. I got about 41 pages in and just flaked out. Though, in my defense, I got married around page 28, so he's lucky I managed to squeeze out 13 more pages before giving in to my wife's demands to, like, spend time with her and stuff.
At this point, I doubt I'll finish it. Looking at my art from over a decade ago hurts my soul. But who knows? Maybe when Star Fetched is finished... No, probably not. Here are a few pages from the book (be gentle; I was young and untalented!):
