The Golden Age of Comic
Get ready, this is where it gets complicated. This is where I started getting interested in complexity.
The Start of an Era Arc
Fourth grade was a month from ending. I wasn't sure where my writing would take me next. Then one day, one fateful day, fat little Jordan decided to look up chao for the hell of it. I used to have chao, waaay back when I was eight or so, but for reasons of convenience, my brother Nathan had to get rid of them all. I didn't care; I was eight or so! But years later, when I was ten and fat, I looked up chao for the hell of it and discovered a site called Chao Civic. I joined its forums, and what the hell, I had an urge to make a new topic.
Dark Chao Adventures (First generation, 2005)
I decided to pay a memory to my lost chao, though I had very little idea what I'd actually do. I just made a thread and called it "Dark Chao Adventures." It wound up becoming not a prose story, but an episodic script series. I put all the chao I remembered into it and made the plot revolve around my Dark chao as they had childish battles with the Hero chao. Metal Sonic and his "poker buddies" entered the fray at some point, actually playing poker every Thursday night. At what I consider to be one of the series' low points, I even put Invader Zim in there. I admit, the first season of DCA was pretty much just Dark chao with a ten-year-old's perception of "Zim humour."
Every episode received praise and acclaim. I think it's safe to say this set in motion events that would lead to some of the most influential moments of my growing mind. Season one ended with episode eight, and I tried making a second season before the forums shut down for good and I lost everything-- except for the entire first season, which I had been crazy enough to save. I wound up forgetting about DCA for a while as sixth grade began.
The Discovery of Blog
My sixth-grade language arts teacher was fantastic; she was a British lady named Mrs. Courtade, and she loved me. Because I was also British. And she knew my brother! ..anyway, early in the year, she encouraged every kid in the class to set up a web log (also known as a "blog!"). My blog never had a name, nor even really a point. It was just for random things, like fat ol' me talking about my day or something. I still have records of the thing; it's just downright sickening, how young and naive I was!
Dark Chao Adventures (Second generation, 2006-2008)
Around Christmas of 2006, I remembered Dark Chao Adventures and brought it into my goofy little blog. I made a new second season, as well as a couple episodes into season three. And then I discovered a new chao forum: Chao Talk. I shared everything there, and I gathered a new fanbase of chao fans. For this little generation here, I got all the way up to what, season six? Season three gave us my first ever "epic" script: the season finale was the length of three normal full-sized episodes! I actually cut the script short and spread the story out among the entirety of season four.
Season five presented me with many opportunities to experiment. One, in particular, got my brain rushing still to this day: I tried experimenting with emotions, seeing if I could influence my readers' empathy. I wound up writing a pretty shitty little plot of, like.. "Mephiles convinces the Dark chao to disband." It really wasn't that good. And then season six was pure experimentation; I wrote the chao going through all kinds of video games, huge scripts with extremely intricate plots. This wound up shaping my writing tastes greatly. "Wacky adventure over several video game(-inspired) worlds while the bad guys aren't actually bad guys but they are always watching" has been a common theme in my writing.
But my fanbase faltered as soon as season six started. They all grew up; they didn't have time for chao anymore. I started writing for myself, experimenting far more wildly, trying all kinds of things. I gave the story a break after finishing the second Halloween special in 2008.
The Blogging Dark Ages
After a year of keeping my blog (putting us at 2007), the host site (blog-city.com) switched to a pay-to-blog method, so I had to stop my blog and get it archived.
Around this time, I looked into other, more free blogging options. I found Blogger, and I set up a little dorky blog titled DJay32's Paper Dimension. If you read its first post, you might be surprised about a couple things. I'll explain those as I go along. I didn't use Blogger much for the longest time, although when I did use it, I tried to contribute to a little story of mine.
Hoshi no Kaabii: Shadow Shutdown
I wanted to try prose of some sort, and I was still interested in fanfiction, so I gave Kirby a try and made a story using a lot of themes from Kirby 64. The story was, like.. "Dark Matter has returned, lookit how eldritch it is." I never finished it.
Instead, I was focusing my writing at school.
The Golden Age of Comics
Throughout sixth grade, I came up with more and more detailed and complex comic ideas.
Genocide
This was a Super Mario RPG fanfiction comic series. The first issue had a terrible plot: "Geno has been invited for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but he got lost on the way!" But I wound up experimenting with adventures, giving an interesting take on the Forest Maze, a strange windmill town, and a mansion where the only safety is the area touched by the beam of your flashlight. The comic wound up having a bit of an anime feel to it, even though I had no idea how to pronounce "genocide." My interest in the comic tapered off when I realized how hard it was to draw the mansion serial.
The Zig
Here's where I tried being indie. I wrote a comic where the first row is read from left to right, but then you go to the panel directly below that and read the next line right-to-left. And so on. I mean, it was really fun to write at the time, and I wound up getting up to volume thirty-something. Every ten volumes was a serial; the first ten were a Paper Mario-based story about Boos, the second ten were a Kirby adventure that actually didn't suck, and the third ten were all Tails Doll creepypasta from Sonic R. Then my interest tapered off.
U BIN URF BOWN'D!!!
I made exactly one issue of this. Don't even.. let's just not talk about it. ..well, alright. It was a skit-based comic about EarthBound. It was terrible. Which is why I only did one issue.
Sean
This was my pride and joy of sixth grade, right here. One day, in French class, my friend Sean Desmond jokingly suggested I make a comic about him. The comic I threw together featured him fighting ninjas on a rooftop, jumping off, and then getting eaten by a crocodile.
Sean loved this, so he officially turned the comic into a collaboration project. He made Sean 2: Sean's Payback, which consisted of him breaking out of the crocodile, finding me, and shooting me for making the comic. I continued with the epic three-pager Sean 3: Anghell's Revenge, which had my brother Nathan (dubbed "Anghell" in reference to his usual screenname) try to kill Sean for killing me. In the end, I walked back in and asked what was going on, and then the two of them killed me.
Sean gave the world Sean 4: Sean and Jordan after this, which was of himself and myself goofing off and shooting each other and becoming superheroes. Then I made the comic to end all comics with Sean 5. Probably had a subtitle, don't remember. This was a six-pager. o: It had our characters trying to save the world from a giant meteor controlled by Anghell. I died a lot! :DDDD
The Sean comic series came to an end here when Sean didn't get around to making a sixth installment, but I still had more plans in store for the series.
(There was also the Naes comics, where I basically redid the first three comics, making them all look really really good.)
In retrospective, The Golden Age of Comic was one of the most important eras of my writing ever. So much happened here that we essentially had two parallel eras at the same time: We had the discovery of blog, which got my young mind interested in things to come, and we had the golden age of comics, where I basked in the fun of expanding on my skills.
Still to come, I do a super-special and relatively unique thing with the Sean series, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting! We'll find out, though, won't we?
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