the PunX: 25th Anniversary (Digital) Edition
As I approach my 40th solar orbit, I realize it also means I started making comics 25 years ago. Yes, 1995 was 25 years ago. Depending on your age and life experience, this fact might feel very bizarre. And being an elderly statesman now, I find myself pondering who I really am, as old men often do. I sometimes flip through old manila folders full of art I’ve done; six of which are etched with a differently numbered “the PunX” issue. I thought what better time to revisit some old pages and old friends, who incidentally are people in real life, than this occasion.
The Simone brothers lived two blocks away from my brother and I and were (are) the same ages as us. In a time of no internet and having no awareness of anything outside of Disney movies, they were our portal to everything “cool” in movies and geek culture. Everything they exposed us to was inspiration to create. We would go on to make dozens of backyard movies together and invent dumb video game ideas that I would sketch out.
Early on, I tried drawing my own X-Men comics but it just led to comparing too much to the pros doing the same, which was an easy slide towards discouragement. What I needed was my own characters that only existed in my pages to encourage me to keep going.
“You should draw us in a comic,” Adam would say. And after a few silly pages of the four of us doing nothing really, he still hyped it up so much. I guess no matter how poorly done, seeing yourself in a comic was pretty cool. I suddenly had a built in audience! The next months (into years) of free time I spent drawing as quick as I could to give “my fans” a new issue. That feeling of handing them a new installment and watching them read are still the most cherished creative feelings I’ve ever had.
The trials of teenage years felt like a deviation of my soul. I wasnot able to see the long path, only detours. But throughout it all, the PunX was a distant yet constant light in my dark cave. Good or bad, these pages were mine. A lonely solace within the panels where my brother and friends could adventure.
The first five issues encapsulate many a high school night. And it continued throughout college whenever I had the chance. You know that scene in Big, where Tom Hanks is doing an adult report and then switches into a video game to remind himself he was really a kid? That was me with this comic. The idea was to keep it going throughout life and maybe one day, there would be a time to reflect on these humble beginnings...
So come along into my basement of mediocrity and flip through my memory longbox!
Click around to be taken to the PunX landing page. Read. Flip through. Laugh. Vomit. Have fun.
I also tried to add some witty anecdotes to a bunch of pages to give a little extra context to them, sort of a director’s commentary. (Depending on your device and browser, the comments may or may not appear. I think there is a small circle bottom right on mobile and on desktop you hover over the image.) There’s also some bonus stuff outside these issues of sketches, posters and abandoned pages.
DISCLAIMERS:
Click here to go to the issue selector…
Lettering: you'll notice some pages are harder to read and I actually started attempting to re-letter but:
I hate lettering
I kind of liked the preservation of how it really looks
My words don't exactly need to be read
Believe it or not, this was NOT an official Image comic, despite it's logo throughout the series. At the time, Image Comics was brand new and quickly became my fave publisher and exciting to see that "i" on anything.
Page sizes are 8.5 x 11 because that was the common size most available to me. Drawn with paper mate mechanical pencil #2.
You might notice issue 6 is very short. This was because during issue 7's creation, I thought at that time it was a good place to reboot the series and be able to hand people a new jumping on point. So pages from #6 were organ donors to give #7 a complete one shot feel, to hand to people outside the people inside this comic (which never happened). I even went to Kinko's and made a few copies of this reboot.
All words and misspellings are intact as they were at their time of creation (see 1.(b.) with a few exceptions. I was a teenage boy and the vernacular of the time and the age was often to disparage another using gay slurs. Without really thinking of the weight of these words, some ended up in these pages to bolster the aggression and probably without two seconds of consideration. I could have just removed without mentioning but I thought it worth mentioning because it was honestly embarrassing to read back now. Also removed were some instances where a character would make a weight joke at the expense of one of my oldest and best friends Aaron. Very doubtful Aaron read this comic then, even cared about those jokes, or is even reading this now, but I love him and never want a bad thing said towards him.)
If you are still reading this: I made a very limited run of hardcovers and have three left as of this posting so if you don’t like digital much, hit me up.
These pages are like old family photographs of mine. I hid them from the world for so long, much like my love for comics. This is me aging 25 years.
Mikey P
Miami Lakes, FL
March 2020
