A Retrospective of Lumpy
For every person who makes comic books, there was a point in their life when they decided to make the jump from a reader to a creator. For me, it started long ago in a simpler age known as the 1990s. More specifically, the year was 1998. Most remember that time for all the naughty things Bill Clinton was up to. Not me.
I was a sophomore in high school and, like everyone else in my tiny western Pennsylvania town, I was singing Tubthumping on the school bus and watching Bruce Willis save the world from that killer asteroid in Armageddon. I was already making strange comic strips for the student newspaper. It was time for something bigger. I decided to finally make my own comic book. There had been a couple of false starts before this and even a half-hearted collaboration with my friend, Phil.
This time I found my hero while flipping through a spiral notebook full of doodles that I drew when I should have paid attention in class. A cartoon of a beady-eyed lumberjack got the gears of my imagination moving. Thus was born Lumpy, Canadian Demi-God. He was a man’s man who lived alone in the barren tundra and took no guff from anyone. Despite his wishes to just be left alone, poor Lumpy was dragged into all sorts of shenanigans.
I remember I named him after one of my dad’s old model railroad buddies. He was a big dude with a black, bushy beard that everyone called “Lumpy” for whatever reason, so it seemed kind of perfect. As for the Canadian theme, I don’t think I’ll ever know why I was so preoccupied with Canadian superheroes. There was Alpha Flight published by Marvel Comics that I sort of read every once in a while, but no great fascination with those strange maple leaf obsessed folk up north. I’ve only ever been to Canada once and that was just a quick trip over the border to see Niagara Falls when I was 8.
So, together with his mutant moose, conveniently named Mutant Moose, and his trusty mythical axe, he took on the other-worldly menace of the Invaders from Dimension 12. Upon its completion, I turned it in for a project in my art class. For the life of me, I can’t remember just what grade Mr. Jones ended up giving me. It must of not been that bad, as I would go on to make a series of comic books for his class with such electrifying titles as The Diamond Knight, The Educating Four, and Chimp Cheeso.
There was more Lumpy too, though I eventually dropped the “Canadian Demi-God” tag line and just called him the more modest “Lumpy the Lumberjack.” He’d go on to fight the Man-Eating Maple, the Machine That Turned Everything Green, and the weird beast Orval Elkhead. To date, only the original handmade book exists. It would take me another year or so to even attempt to reproduce and distribute these early efforts.
I didn’t do much with the character after high school, though the burly Canadian still holds a special place in my heart as my first comic book character. Now, decades later, I’ve self published well over 100 titles, so to any future historians, have fun tracking down this obscure artifact. To others, maybe this short tale will help inspire you to take your own leap and make your own comic.