Ever have one of those weird childhood memories you just can't seem to shake?
Good memories, like mysteries, are something you carry around with you always.
This one is mine.
It involves a kid named Wesley and the first comic book characters
I ever made at the ripe old age of six years old.
Their names are MooMoo Man and MooMoo Boy
And this, is how you draw them.
I've been drawing these characters for literally as long as I can remember.
I doodled them all through school and even into college.
I even went through this really dumb graffiti stage and learned how to pull the design off with spray paint.
These two dairy themed superheroes are about the only things I can draw with any
efficiency, which isn't saying much, obviously.
Here's the story, as best as I can remember it.
In the first grade, I met a kid named Wesley Chau.
This is Wesley and this is me.
Actually no wait this-yeah,
THIS is me.
Took me a few years to grow into my own skin.
If memory serves, Wesley and I hit it off immediately.
He loved drawing and I loved anything that didn't involve paying attention during class.
One day, Wesley asked if I wanted to help him with a comic book he was working on.
And like any six-year-old, I eagerly agreed.
Moomoo Man and MooMoo Boy were superhero cows.
They fought crime,
stood up for the downtrodden,
and they promoted a healthy and balanced diet by
supplying the town of Springfield with farm-fresh milk to local grocers.
See Springfield is the home of Hiland Dairy,
a farmer owned processing and distributing plant of milk and other dairy products.
Hiland Dairy served as the MooMoo headquarters.
Being six year olds the concepts of copyright and trademark infringement weren't exactly on our minds,
So we used that company's logo during the comics print run with absolutely no reservations.
Here's how a comic book print run works when you're in first grade:
Each comic book was five wide ruled notebook pages long,
Stapled together crudely.
This meant we had a front cover,
back cover,
seven page story,
and even a little front page insert for sponsored advertisements.
(Of course we can't forget those.)
The covers design was pretty simple.
I remembered even to this day the issue number went in the upper left hand corner,
our titular heroes always peeked in from the side,
and each adventure had its own unique title.
Two recurring villains in the mooniverse,
[Ugh]
were Suzanne Kong and Tinazilla.
Both of them were named after our older sisters.
Wesley and I churned these stories out like our lives depended on it.
We had a solid readership among our classmates.
Like eight kids or something were subscribed.
We had constant requests for new characters, new adventures.
We even had a few multi-issue story arcs.
I remember Star Fox was like a really big deal of the time.
So eventually MooMoo Man and MooMoo Boy each got star fighters,
and they went to outer space, and yes
You can assume that these comics were full of first grade level jokes and innuendos.
There were some other interesting story bits that I remember.
Uh, MooMoo Boy retired from crime fighting briefly to become a rapper.
He turned evil for a bit.
There was an epic battle between the two where he earned a cybernetic eye.
I think that one was a bit ahead of its time.
I want to say there was this weird spin-off where
MooMoo Man grew a mustache that had mind-control powers.
I think Wesley and I had creative differences about that one.
Eventually, like all things,
We got older.
Somewhere along the way, Wesley and I quit drawing the comic.
I transferred to a new school system.
I did that a lot growing up and as a result Wesley faded away from my life.
To this day I have never reconnected with him.
I doubt we'd even recognize each other if we met on the street.
Yet, somehow,
Someway, these memories persist.
Forever coupled, it seems, with the muscle memory of drawing these characters.
Over 20 years later, they persist.
20 years later, and I still draw them.
I know what you're thinking YouTube commenter,
Why should you care about some dorky little comic made by a couple kids?
I have no idea.
You shouldn't, really.
But lately, I've been thinking a lot about memory,
and how influential such a flawed mechanism is on the human heart.
Memories grow old, they're faulty, easily corrupted by time, and fate,
yet, often they're all we have.
We toss them away with abandon, and it's not always clear why we keep the ones that we do.
I have childhood memories;
Particularly the not-so-nice ones that I've managed to drop into the ocean of time.
Some memories after all are best kept in the past.
But this one, this good memory, for some strange reason keeps floating up no matter how many years go by.
Who knows what memory might decide to break the surface next.
I'm working on something, it's big.
It's going to take a little bit more time till it's ready for everyone to see, but it is coming.
Thanks for hanging in there.