American S(c)hmoes

Here are the 9 main characters of my series American S(c)hmoes.

This was the first of my major series which I began in the summer of 2004 when I was just about to enter high school and completed in my senior year.

Never have I created a series that I spent so much time on. Over the course of writing and drawing it, I have filled up around 40 Mead spiral-bound notebooks of various lengths (1-3 subjects) and compiled them into 30 volumes.

It follows a group of kids (of an undisclosed age group but it is assumed they're tweens) and their sometimes crazy and sometimes mundane adventures through life. The series itself is an episodic comedy and has no real overall plot line. I basically made it to record any funny event that happens to me or anything funny that I think up. It also served as a platform for social commentary, though the only person to ever have read it was my dad, whom I coerced into reading sometimes. Perhaps, in a way, it was the first real journal I ever kept. Things would happen and the characters' dialogs would be my response to them.

For this particular series, I've made up a slew of characters (over 230). I even made a spin-off though it was less successful, since I did not put as much effort into it.

I was never much for diaries so I suppose drawing things out, putting in a story line, and adding humor was how I would express my feelings about things. Each character would have their own personality but I'll admit that if a little bit were taken from each of them and the bits were compressed into one being, that would be me.

Stories just make sense to me.