SENTIMENTALITY

I got the biggest happy warm feeling today.

No, I didn't wet my pants in public.

It was this innocuous thing: Mikeintosh drew The Spanker from my online comic, Diaperman. He and I had created the character a long time ago; and after our big fight of a few years ago he stopped drawing the comic.

Since then I've had other artists drawing it, but it hasn't been the same; when you create something with another person, there's always something of them that is part of its foundation.

Recently, I asked Mike for help with the newest script I'm writing for Diaperman. I had all the facts for the script, but none of the funny; it used to be that the jokes would come from Mike and I spitballing ideas back and forth-- I would tell the story that I had in mind and he would "riff" it, making jokes about it-- and I'd work those into the story. This would also set ME off, until we'd have whole joke storylines that I'd then have to pare down for the funny stuff but still keep a meat-and-potatoes plotline going.

Today, out of the blue, he drew The Spanker, the villain of the story, which we always identified as his "persona" while Diaperman was mine. In essence, it was cartoon Mike and cartoon Michael acting out wacky hijinks starring thinly-veiled sendups of our friends and other people we knew.

That all ended when Mike and I stopped speaking. I still did the comic, but it didn't have that two-wacky-friends-putting-one-over-on-the-world feel.

Then, today, he drew his character again. Out of the blue. And it made me feel...really, really good. He called it "revisiting an old friend." And that is very much how I felt upon seeing the drawing. It reminded me of how it used to be; the good parts of the fun and the sassiness of it all. And that made me feel inexplicably happy, gratified and sucky all at the same time.

It was almost like a return to innocence. And hey, Diaperman's all about innocence-- and The Spanker's constant frustration with such a naïve worldview. It was sharing the joke again-- a joke that we've been tentatively speaking bits of, little by little.

Today felt like a door opened. And I know that some of you out there, maybe even Mike himself, will say "For the love of GOD, man, it was just a DRAWING," but it meant a lot to me to see it. And I just wanted to share.

I'll post the drawing or a link to it when it's done. Just made me happy, is all. Zip-a-dee-friggin' DOO DAH.

Posted by Agent M at October 13, 2003 06:40 PM