My Fourteen Year Old Self Was So Fucking Goth

[Currently Listening To: Home Video - No Certain Night or Morning]


I've been a little busy lately, so the ol' blog hasn't been getting much love. It keeps asking me "Rob, maybe you could... write in me tonight?" and I say "Not tonight honey, I have a headache. It was a long day at work. Maybe tomorrow."

Yes, I speak directly to my blog, and I call it "honey."

Anyway, I'm still busy, but while I was looking for something today I came across a folder of funny old drawings from when I was a kid, and I felt they were worth sharing.

When I was a wee lad, drawing was everything to me. I would draw all day, every day, filling any scrap of paper I could find with the fruits of my overactive imagination. I drew comic strips and trading cards and 3-d pictures. I had hundreds of little characters I'd created, and I spent hours upon hours carefully rendering their little adventures. The sheer volume of childhood art I produced bordered on obsessive-compulsive, but it was all very cute and innocent - exactly the type of spaceships-and-monsters fantasia you'd expect from the mind of a little boy. This, for example, is a drawing I did when I was eleven years old:



Aww, isn't it cute? A cute little dragon in a magical land. At twelve years old, I got into an extremely neurotic phase of drawing giant, elaborate mazes. I don't know why - they were too unwieldy for my friends to even want to attempt. But I was oddly fascinated with them. I drew dozens, maybe hundreds, each more pointlessly complex than the last. Here's one I found:



In retrospect that's a pretty weird thing to do, but I was only getting started. As puberty encroached, bringing with it the strange traumas of acne and voice changes and hair growing on my balls, something must have snapped in me. Out of nowhere, my formerly cute drawings became absurdly graphically violent. At the tender age of fourteen, I was very into comic books, and spent a great deal of time perfecting my ability to draw Spider-Man and Wolverine, as any other artistically-inclined teenage nerd would do. One day, during math class, I inexplicably felt the need to draw Wolverine ripping a guy's head off with his claws:



These days, I realize most fourteen year olds already have three kids and a coke habit, but in the comparatively innocent days of the early nineties, being dweeby pubescent boys meant that our days were spent playing Super Nintendo, our nights were spent lighting off fireworks in the park, we'd never so much as sipped a wine cooler, and our closest encounters with sex involved trying to glimpse a nipple through the fuzzy lines of the scrambled Playboy channel, and denying that we ever masturbated (i guess not much has really changed in my life). So it was probably some sort of pent up teenage angst that turned me into that kid - you know, the one sitting quietly at his desk, wearing torn up jeans and a black Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, scribbling away at methodically-rendered images of death and violence. I didn't feel mentally disturbed, I just... really liked drawing blood and guts.

The result was hundreds of drawings and sketches, usually done during school when I was meant to be paying attention (what do you learn in middle school, anyway? I don't remember any of it), of people being violently maimed and tortured in the most graphic and imaginative ways I could come up with. My mother was very concerned about me, and I was sent to the school counselor by worried teachers on several occasions. I really don't think there was anything wrong with me, I was just beginning the long and wonderful journey towards complete and utter desensitization that would culminate in this atrocity.

I was so enamored with my Wolverine drawing that I decided to explore some other interesting ways of killing people. Here's a guy who was caught off guard by some angry spikes while he was, I don't know, just sitting around in a dungeon, I guess:



For some reason, my victim was always the same guy - some anonymous, perpetually shirtless dude with bad nineties hair who apparently deserved to suffer endlessly at the merciless hands of my colored pencils. Maybe it was just the only guy I could draw, but either way, the incredibly homo-erotic overtones of all these buff, topless men were somehow lost on me at the time. Here's my same shirtless guy again; the spikes theme was working out well for me, so I expanded upon it by tossing the poor fellow into a pit of them, where his body tore into pieces like a stuffed animal:



Then I brought the grim reaper in for some good ol' fashioned beheadings. I like the cross going through the guy's severed neck hole, out his mouth, and leaving a piece of his nose stuck up at the top. Nice touch, teenage Rob:



And, yes, the tombstone on the right says "R.I.P. K Cobain" (although the date listed is the date of the drawing, not the date of his death). Could I be any more of a cliche angst-wridden nineties Seattle teenager?

What I considered to be my masterpiece at the time was a two-page spread I called "The Rack," depicting a torture chamber which looks more like it's one semen stomach pump incident away from being a gay S&M club gone horribly wrong (click to enlarge):



As ridiculous as these are, I have to at least appreciate the knack for detail I had at such a young age. Notice the rats gnawing away at the whip-lashed flesh of dead buff shirtless guy #1:



Or the vertebrae coming apart amidst snapping tendons and tearing flesh as the medieval stretching device pulls a little too hard on dead buff shirtless guy #2:



Needless to say, I, uh, wasn't exactly a big hit with the ladies at this point in my life.

There are many, many more where these came from. Thankfully I was pretty much out of my death and gore phase by the time I got to high school, but some sort of subconscious need for balance plunged me immediately into an arguably more disturbing phase of drawing really gay psychedelic fantasy art. Looking back on it all, it's hard to imagine my mother didn't send me to therapy.

Okay, back to work now.