When I was a teenager collecting comics as a serious hobby, I also liked to draw on my notebook paper. I actually wanted to write a comic book for either DC Comics or Marvel Comics. If I couldn't do that, then I wanted to write and draw my own amateur comic. So I drew comics on paper and would talk my mom into letting me get free copies of them at her work place. Which was bad of me! I tried to sell them to classmates at school, but most people wouldn't buy them. Eventually my mom's boss found out and I had to stop copying my comics or start paying for the copies. He once asked me to draw a promotional comic for his store and I did, but he never used it for an ad in the local newspaper like he told me he would. So my career as a comic writer and artist never took off. It was one of those things I just gave up doing.
The character above is Firegirl, a character I first drew in 1985. This is a retraced version of a 1985 drawing that appeared in a comic that I called "Strange Adventures" Special Edition #1 (February 1986), published by my company which I named Magic Comics. I now realize that DC had a comic series with the name "Strange Adventures". I was a 14-year-old kid who was just learning about these cool comics I was collecting and didn't know any better.
Firegirl's real name is Alison Risley; Alison because I liked the name, and Risley was taken from the names of some relatives of mine. Alison was splashed with chemicals while watching her scientist father conduct an experiment and then a fire started in his lab. Both of them made it out alive, but Alison gained fire-creating and controlling powers. She could also fly. Firegirl was the leader of a group of super-powered kids named The Kid Elite. The other members were Fade-Away Girl (who "faded away", as I had her say, rather than turn invisible); The All-American Kid (who could fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes with the help of a protective visor - I unknowingly ripped off MLJ's The Comet!); Starlight (the youngest member, who could absorb light and then release it in any form, exactly like Marvel's The Dazzler); Blackout (the only black kid in the group, who used mental powers to cloud, or "blackout", people's minds); and The Incredible Shrinking Kid (who, obviously, could shrink).
Another thing I created was an experimental strip named "Space Ace Kelly". Most of my comics were black and white with a color cover (which I hand colored with colored pencils). "Space Ace Kelly" was meant to be a color strip in an otherwise black and white comic. It didn't last long before I stopped creating comics. Here is all I drew for "Space Ace Kelly".
Eventually I reprinted some of my favorite comics in a new comic named "Magic Comics" with retraced over art and improved lettering. This time I paid for the copies, but I was even less successful this time around. I was now an adult and I felt silly doing this. Years later I took a course to learn how to write for children and teens. I passed the course, and then I tried to get some of my prose stories published in children's magazines. Publishers weren't interested. I wrote eight prose stories for Firegirl and The Kid Elite, but I haven't shown them to many people. I even wrote out a four part prose story that completed my concept for the "Space Ace Kelly" comic strip. I made a few minor changes, but it was still the same story.
Thank you reading this.
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