My mother used to subscribe to the Disney Book Club. Every month, two hardcover picture books about Disney characters would be sent to our mailbox, along with two bonus books annually: the Disney Year Book, a collection of short stories and articles, and the Disney Diary, which was allegedly something a kid could scribe an entire year's worth of events into. I was sent six Disney Diaries from 1989 through 1994, and I say "allegedly" because...well, look at all the space they gave me to work with.
Open any page of the Diary and you'll see an article or puzzle on the left side, and a week's worth of "entries" on the right. Any kid would be lucky to fit two sentences per day into that space, and there are entire stretches of months when I just wrote nothing.
Other times, I had more to say and well, I did the best I could.
It's the age-old comment: "Come on, Disney, you can afford to do better than that." And you could hear Michael Eisner echo from California: "But then how would I maintain stockholder value? You will own one seventh of a page per day and like it."
I did use the Disney Diaries quite a bit, but not for their intended purpose. They served as a backboard whenever I was drawing comics on the floor. Many many issues of Scrambled Eggs and other such stories were conceived on the backs of these diaries.
The diary said on its first page to save it because I would want it as a grown-up. I didn't doubt it, but when I did use the Disney Diary in the intended fashion, the space didn't allow for much. The things I can remember don't need exhaustive detail, but the things I can't...well, I wish there was more there than "Today I went to school, I read a book, I pet a cat, I went to bed." This is the diary's fault, not mine.
Despite all odds, though, the diaries have their moments of value.
I can thank the Disney Diary for putting an exact date to this formative moment in my life: the day I walked into the bookstore and saw this gigantic new book with Opus the Penguin on it. $12.95 was a lot of money for my dad to spend on a random day, but I was not leaving without it. And for the next few weeks I was completely obsessed with Classics Of Western Literature, a heavy anthology of the second half of Bloom County's run. I had no hope of understanding the political or social satire, but I didn't care. I loved how the art and writing just kept getting better as the book progressed. Those arty, colorful, experimental Sunday strips from 1988 fascinated me and inspired me to try surreal experiments with my own drawings. I'd enjoyed Bloom County before, mainly through mining my hoarder dad's newspaper piles for random strips, but the moment I got that book was the moment Berke Breathed became one of my biggest influences.
Flip a couple pages and you can see drawings of Opus and the other characters all over the place. Yup, I was officially obsessed. It might've been my first true feelings of fandom. This was also the time I started Henry and Jennifer, which wound up heavily influenced by Bloom County to the point that it just became fanfic for the first few months, with Binkley leading the story instead of the title characters.
I have my doubts you can read these two entries, but if you can, then one particular sentence probably stands out at you. "After school Grandma ran over someone so we were 7-8 minutes late." Talk about burying the lede. I remember this incident in its entirety, so allow me to fill in the blanks...including why that only delayed us eight minutes.
Ordinarily, I would walk home because my apartment was right next to the school, separated by a park. But sometimes when Mom was busy and wouldn't be home, Grandma would pick me up instead and take me to her house in Milwaukie. This was one of those days. We went down Powell Street and passed by Kellogg Middle School, and all of a sudden some teenage clown jumped right in front of the car. It was too late for her to stop, so we hit the biggest speed bump I ever felt in my life.
Grandma yelled a word I didn't normally hear her yell and immediately pulled into the parking lot inches away. I told her there was no way I was getting out to be scarred for life by the sight of a mutilated body, and she understandably agreed. She couldn't avoid it herself though, and exited the vehicle...to find no one. Incredibly, the teenager had gotten right back up and run into the school.
Grandma told me to stay in the car while she investigated. She walked into the school while I sat there. And as I sat, the other kids came gathering around the bus stop to hear the latest news. I'll never forget this exchange of dialogue:
"What happened?"
"Jason got ran over by a car!"
"AGAIN??"
This marks a day when my mother was doing errands all over the city and, as usual, I had to tag along and be bored. This time, though, she kept running into the same lady. She would go to the clothes store and the lady would be looking at the other rack. Then she'd take a dress to the counter, and so would the lady. Then she'd go to the grocery store, and the lady would show up in the same aisle. Over and over, the lady again. It was crazy, and both women were amused by it. Eventually Mom invited the lady to lunch, and they had a lively conversation, and it felt like she'd made a true friend that day.
We never saw the lady again.
Sometimes some days have a lack of details because I just got lazy. These were the years when indoor jungle gyms like Discovery Zone were exploding in popularity. Every time I wanted to go in one, though, there would be this cheesy sign by the entrance that said "MUST BE AS TALL AS THIS BADLY DRAWN CARTOON CHARACTER" and set the limit at four feet in height. I was slightly over four feet. Outdoor playgrounds never had this stupid requirement.
This particular day, I saw a local McDonalds had a shiny new PlayPlace and had to get in, but was stymied by one of those signs. Dad looked at me and said something very wise: "You're close enough, get in there." I did and had a blast. But I spent my entire diary time drawing lines where the sentences would go instead of the sentences themselves, and then a map to diagram where each adventure happened, and then I lost my interest. Darn me!
I was very fortunate to spend a significant chunk of my childhood in a large apartment complex with its own playground and pool, next to a city park, with a population of a zillion kids. The 90s were the in-between decade when the Gen-X latchkey kids who were free to ride their bikes anywhere to find pirate treasure were being replaced by imprisoned Millennial children of paranoid helicopter parents. It didn't happen overnight, and this complex was one of the pockets of resistance. I got to have all sorts of unsupervised adventures, both in the complex and the park. There's even a fort mentioned here. I got to have a childhood with FORTS in it!
Now here's a pain anybody who grew up during the days of Saturday Morning can relate to. You turn on the TV expecting your show, and the network puts some stupid boring sports on instead, with no warning (like we were going to inspect the TV Guide schedule beforehand; the show should just be there). If you're too young to relate, imagine loading up Minecraft and finding a bunch of middle-aged people playing golf instead. You wouldn't like that, would you?
This would become known as "Black Saturday." It was the day in early 1992 when my mother and my soon to be stepfather decided to clean out my entire closet and, in the process, throw away every drawing, comic and story I "hadn't completed." I don't know why that was the measuring stick, but it covered a lot of ground. I've held onto more of my childhood creations than most people, but I would have even more if this hadn't happened. This is one of those events I would stop if I had a time machine.
A rough fifty percent of the entries in these diaries are useless, containing one-sentence summaries like "Today was a day" or "Today nothing happened." When I see stuff like this now I want to tell my younger self "thanks a lot" sarcastically.
As for the pre-printed content in the books, it was often prone to vandalism. I had a habit of making the characters say things the parent company wouldn't approve of.
They never should have given me that option.
In the last couple of volumes, the entries get sparser, and when they do show up they're often angry rants about living with my parents. You can smell the stinky body odor of encroaching adolescence.
Woof!
The truth is, I was never a "diary" kind of kid. The idea of having a book specifically for writing down events in your life, and nothing BUT, was too strict a rule to have much appeal to me. But I somehow did wind up keeping a thorough record of my childhood...in other ways.
Our apartment was two blocks away from a strip mall, and one of the tenants was a Hallmark. You could get blank hardcover books there, and it appealed to me to "publish" my work in hardcover. This thing was made to be a diary. But in my hands it became "Supra Story," an elaborate, illustrated chronicle of my second grade class and what they were doing in the spring of 1990. From April 20 to May 6 I took notes in class of what everyone around me was saying, or at least seemed to be saying, then went home and copied it all into the book, with each "chapter" being a page or less. It covers several school projects, several recesses both outside and inside, and our school play that year.
In other words...a diary? No, I didn't think of it as one. It was an elaborate 64-page biographical novel, with color illustrations! I planned to show it off to the class once it was completed, and I did. Because I made this, I preserved details of second grade so intricate that they would be impossible to recall otherwise. The first four pages cover just one inside recess, which we would have whenever it rained. Our teacher hated these because they were so chaotic and created a total mess. We loved them for the same reasons.
Here's my translation of everything that's going on. Inside recess was divided into several activities in different corners of the room. There was a race track with toy cars, there were completed assignments from other kids that you could correct (only the brainy kids spent their time doing this) and there was a pretend bank, which was not something the teacher set up but something the kids came up with. There was also a class rabbit and a class hamster, and hoboy, the things the kids would do to them during inside recess would make you faint. What I've vaguely described here are two kids sticking the hamster in an open shoebox and then skating the shoebox across the room as fast as they could shove it. That hamster always looked like she was about to wet herself. I doubt this kind of thing is allowed anymore, and if it still is, those teachers suck.
After Supra Story premiered at school and was a hit, I made a regular habit of getting blank journals from Hallmark and filling them up with semi-biographical class adventures...and by that I mean, I would start with something that really happened and then exaggerate it with things that didn't. I called them "fict-fact books." They're an entire separate article on their own, which I'll get to someday.
And there's more. In third grade I had this palm-sized notebook in my desk, which I'd draw comics into based on what was happening in class. Our third-grade teacher had an ingenious way of keeping us in line: we had "point cards" taped to our desks, and we could earn points with good behavior and lose points for misbehaving. Every month or so an "Auction Day" would be held where we could win prizes by bidding our accumulated points. Bribery works!
On the first Auction Day we had, the most coveted item was a complete set of trading cards from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie. The set ended up selling to a kid named Devin, and the teacher told him "keep an eye on those cards, or they'll get stolen." I immediately started drawing a comic based on the question, what if they DID get stolen?
So Devin turns around a bit later and discovers his cards are missing. A bunch of criminal thugs see the cards and yell "Look, turtle cards. GET THEM!" Devin yells, "NO!" He is then sprayed with a big canister of "Devin NO."
At the supermarket, they used to sell canisters of spray you were supposed to use on your furniture to keep outdoor pets from hopping on it. The gimmick was that they gave your sofa a smell that pets did not like, but I don't think they sell these anymore because people didn't like the smell either. The point is they were called "Dog NO!" and "Cat NO!," which made me wonder if there was a "NO!" for anything and anyone.
Anyway, Devin appears to blow up, so the thugs grab the cards, but they don't realize Devin is still alive. He comes from behind and punches them all, then takes the cards back, the end. Or is it?
It turns out when you flip the page there are three more chapters to "Devin's Turtle Cards" and Devin appears to be murdered at the end of all three of them. I admit that makes no sense. But I played pretend EXACTLY the way Calvin did:
I kept writing myself into corners. I would cook up these great tales of suspense, then push the danger further and further, and then end up pushing it too far and the person would die. Then I'd go "whoops, what now?" and have to pretend that didn't happen. In Part 5, the bad guy has a button and if he pushes it Devin will instantly disintegrate. Each panel shows his finger slightly closer to the button than it was the panel before. But he had to push it at some point, and after he did I didn't know where to take it.
On a different day, the teacher had a bunch of notes written on the overhead projector and we were supposed to copy them all down. After a few minutes he made the move to wipe the notes away, but several kids screamed they weren't done. A few minutes after that he finally did it, and by that time there was no excuse -- we had a ridiculously long time to copy those notes, and any kid who hadn't had spent the whole time talking to their friends instead of writing. (The notes were about the Civil Rights Movement, as evidenced by the panel where the projector says "MLK DID STUFF.")
In the comic, one girl stands up in rage and yells, "I'M....NOT.....DOOOONE!" She immediately gets into a TANK, rolls up to the teacher and blows him away. Then she takes a CHAINSAW and slices the entire school in half until it collapses, and then she somehow shrinks the rest of the class to ant-size and puts them in a jar. Then she tries to break the jar with her foot and kill everyone. I'm fairly certain this was Dianna; she had a weird temper.
The panel where the tank is towering over the teacher has always cracked me up because instead of any sound effects, I wrote the sound of a dramatic chorus singing "OOOOO AAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" Elsewhere, I've only seen this kind of allusion in Japanese manga, which of course was not circulated in America in the early 90s.
I would not have a written record of any of these mundane events if I hadn't followed my instinct to "embellish" them, and I probably wouldn't remember them otherwise. An incredible amount of my childhood WAS preserved, but not in the manner I intended or realized. Go figure. I was never a diary kinda guy, I was more of a "reporter for Weekly World News" kinda guy.
UNEXPECTED BONUS: I found a detention slip tucked between two pages of the 1990 Disney Diary. However it's not from elementary school, it's from HIGH school. It was delivered by Mrs. Barram, which isn't surprising...she was a humorless ghoul who probably spent her after-school hours shooting puppies for sport. Note the lack of a parental signature here. I doubt I actually showed up for this appointment either.