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April 18, 2006
My buddy Buddy
Praise be to the Internet. Blessed be thy name.
Okay, time for a Rob Schamberger History Lesson, y'all:
8th Grade, I was the fat dorky kid sitting at the back of the class doodling superheroes in the margins of his notebook paper, trying not to be noticed but desperately wanting to be. Yeah, not a lot's changed. Well, I'm not as fat, at least.
But! My love for my craft, even at that age, was fucking contagious. At age 13 I'd already completed about ten full comix, and when someone's that passionate about something, others start to take notice. My art teacher at the time, Mr Klausing, was so impressed, he actually started up a comic book drawing club, hoping others would be as inspired. It was there that I met my good friend, Buddy Hanson.
We hit it off, right away. We were at each others' houses every weekend, drawing like two pubescent madmen, creating all sort of crazy and amazing stories and concepts. It wasn't unusual for the two of us to produce a complete, fully-colored comic in the course of two days. We worked a lot like I later found out Kirby and Simon did, drawing on each others' pages, helping each other out on weak points, and having a god damned blast.
But, over time, and for various reasons, we went our separate ways, and Buddy moved away a couple years later to Chicago. We lost touch, and hadn't talked since '98 or so. Well, imagine my total delight last week when I got an email from him, after he discovered this here internet site while searching for my name.
We got on the phone a couple nights later and talked for a good three hours. It was like we didn't miss a damned beat. Good, good times. We're already talking about sharing a table at WizardWorld Chicago, seeing each other for the first time in about nine years as well. Can't. Wait.
Anyway, here's the last few pages we did together. I think we were both 14 at this point. Not bad. Not bad at all:
Posted by Schamberger at April 18, 2006 08:36 PM