You may be wondering why I want to start a serial story in this blog or why I think I may be good at writing one. That story goes back quite a long time. In 1982, shortly after moving to San Bernardino, I got a job working a Fedco. Some of you may remember Fedco as a membership department store, like Gemco. I'm guessing these sorts of stores were the rage in the 70's, and they were still quite popular when I got to Fedco in the 80's. (Of course, their popularity didn't last much longer. Gemco went under first, and Fedco followed suit, finally going belly up in 1999. The San Bernardino store went under long before then though.) A year or so after I started at Fedco I began working in the Automotive department. As the newest member of that department, I got one of the filthiest jobs in the store— hauling oil and other fluids from the rear warehouse and keeping the floor stocked. I had a flat cart about 6' x 3' that I used to haul the product to the floor. I say 'filthy' because, if you'll recall, oil and transmission fluids were sold at the time in thick paper canisters with metal lids and bottoms. You used to punch a hole in the top with a bottle opener attached to a spout. Those cans gradually 'sweated,' and one that was left alone long enough was sure to have a thin slick coating. The rear warehouse was not attached to the main store and was never equipped with AC so, on top of the normal sweating process, the cans were regularly heated by temperatures that would go over 100 degrees. AND, as if that weren't enough to keep one washing his hands all day, the cans were transported into the warehouse on palettes and those palettes were moved around by forklift. Frequent sloppy driving of the forklifts would see many cans crushed while plastic-wrapped together with uncrushed cans. One crushed can in a flat (of 12) inevitably beslimed the other 11 cans. If a crushed can were left stacked on a palette, the oily slime would drift to other flats as well. So, very nearly every time I hauled a load of oil to the floor, I spent a considerable portion of my time weeding out the violated cans and cleaning off the good ones. It was a FILTHY job.
Despite my general ignorance of automotive parts and their uses, I was quite successful in the department, and my earliest success was staying on top of the oils and transmission fluids. Not only did I keep the retail floor well stocked, I kept it as clean and tidy as possible. To do this, I had to spend a lot of time in the back, making sure my inventory was in good shape. I remember one period of a few days, during the initial clean up, when I was hardly on the sales floor because I was spending so much time in the rear warehouse, organizing and cleaning. It was during Summer, and I would emerge from the warehouse at the end of the day covered in sweat and oil stains. But, when I was done, I got compliments from my department and supervisor and manager for the work I'd done. No one had ever bothered to do this before.
So where does a serial story fit into this? Well, I'm not sure how I got the notion first to do this, but I was big into comic books at the time, and that must have influenced me. For reasons you can deduce from the above paragraphs, I was almost always alone when I was in the rear warehouse. There were two warehousemen, Ron and Tim, who used to move the various products around— yes, with their suspect forklift skills. I would occasionally see them and have a chat with them. But, even when they were in the warehouse, they were seldom in the back row, where my products were. One day, for some unremembered reason, I grabbed a pen out of my pocket and began writing on one of the boxes stacked across from my oil. These boxes were large and had wide open blank spaces. So, I began to scribble the adventures of a super-hero named 'Vegetable Man.'
Vegetable Man was loosely inspired by the Alan Moore run on DC's Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was hugely popular at the time. (If you wonder why, Alan Moore is the writer who eventually went on to write Watchmen.) Honestly, Vegetable Man was a lot closer to Spider-Man than he was to Swamp Thing. In fact, Vegetable Man would use long ropey vines to swing his way through the city, like Spider-Man. But the name of Vegetable Man was definitely an homage to Swamp Thing.
Right there on the side of a box, I spent 15 or 20 minutes writing chapter 1 of the adventures of Vegetable Man. It was five or six paragraphs long and occupied a space about 4" by 7", filled with tight printing. I labeled it as 'No. 1' as well, imagining that someone might go around the warehouse eventually, hunting up other chapters like a literary scavenger hunt. And there were other chapters. Once or twice a week, when I could slip away for a decent amount of time, I would head back to my giant canvas and scribble out further chapters. As they went on, the chapters became longer because, in my head, the story was growing each time I wrote, I had little idea what was coming next, though, until I put pen to... cardboard.
After a few weeks, I noticed that my chapters were disappearing. The boxes weren't getting moved, but someone was using a box cutter to remove the outer layer of the cardboard, thus taking my chapters. Then I ran into Ron and Tim. Up until this time, I only knew these guys to say 'Hi' in passing or, seldomly, have a brief conversation designed to keep us all away from real work in the front. After my chapters started disappearing, they cornered me one day and asked if I seen what was being written on the boxes. I pleaded ignorance, and they confessed they were both avidly reading the chapters and trying to figure out who was writing them. I was not well known in the store, and I guess I didn't even register on their suspect-scope. That was the greatest feeling in the world, though, to know I had two fans.
Unfortunately, right after this, I was transferred to the Toy department and lost my chance to go back to the rear warehouse and write new chapters. With no new chapters forthcoming, I spilled the whole thing to Ron and Tim, and I'm happy to say that they were two of my best friends at Fedco for the next few years.
This was not the end of Vegetable Man though. He lay dormant in me for the next year or so until I started to hang out a lot with my friend Chris. Chris was quite the artist, and we used to discuss comics and Vegetable Man all the time. In fact, buried deep in my boxes of comic goodies, I still have a picture of Rat Boy, Vegetable Man's sidekick, penciled and inked by Chris. After some time, it became clear that I need to write about Vegetable Man again. Since I was buying a lot of comics at the time and spending a lot of hours each week at the comic store, hanging out with John, the guy who worked there, it was natural that I would hit him up for a little counter space. I began handwriting Vegetable Man issues on blank pieces of regular paper and then copying them at the copy store. (This was long before we all had computers and word processors and printers!) Since I didn't want to leave any new fans behind, I started a new storyline and dubbed my text-only comic book 'The Alternate Adventures of Vegetable Man.' Within a few issues, it grew to be multiple pages. I launched a second story and experimented with the format, producing one issue like a newspaper. The issues were distributed for free. Whenever I had a new issue, I left a stack of them on the counter of the comic book store with John's blessing.
Unfortunately for Vegetable Man, after seven or eight issues, John had a falling out with the co-owners of the store and exited over night. (In fact, he spent that night on my couch and got a ride up to Victorville the next day.) I was a good friend of all the stores' owners— they had another store in Redlands— but I didn't like the way John was treated so I stopped going to the store for some time. Vegetable Man disappeared during that hiatus. Without a distribution deal, there was no emphasis to keep publishing. When I did eventually go back, the woman (and owner) who was operating the store then was cool to the idea— and not cool in the good way.
Next time, the back story on my follow-up serial. I know you can't wait! Until then—
"It's clobberin' time!"— The Thing
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