Jordan Minor's Obligatory Blog: Old Stuff Part 9- Glueman Origins

Newsflash! I was a weird little kid who did a lot of weird little stuff. How else would expect something like 300 pages of Pie Planet comic strips to be made? What I’m sharing today though is perhaps the first recorded example of my strange desire to wed creativity that borders on non-sequitur with stupidly elaborate story arcs. I’m talking about the comics I drew in like 1st grade: The Quest of Glueman and Crew. It would’ve been "The Adventure" instead of "The Quest" but I didn’t know how to spell that at the time.

Basically it’s about four super powered anthropomorphic schools supplies (Glueman, his sidekick Eraser Boy, Pencil Man, and Notebook girl) that fought the evil Dr. Scissors and his gang of crayon monsters. When most kids go to school for the first time they think about recess, not me. While the strict monster of the week set-up was pure "Power Rangers," right down to one of the Glueman short stories being an exact retread of the Power Rangers movie plot, the family dynamic of the team itself was more Fantastic Four. That’s even weirder considering I probably wasn’t even aware of that comic at the time.

Looking back on it actually, it’s fun just how obvious it is that I wrote this. The slight genre subversion, the equally humorous and violent nihilism, the pure young boy id and the obsession with story arcs and talking things that shouldn’t talk are all there. Glueman really is just a juvenile precursor to Piff, Mince and T’Chroll.

Some other fun facts include the time I sent the first and perhaps most well-drawn issue in to a comic publisher expecting something to happen. Now it’s tragically gone forever. Also, early covers misspelled “glue” as “gule” and had the number sign in the wrong place. I ripped them off and stapled on new ones so the originals are collector’s items in some dystopian future.

More bizarre colored pencil scribblings! I’m pretty good at reading my own bad handwriting but this is too much. I’ll try to translate anyway. Here’s issue #50.

Looks like Dr. Scissors (hard word for kids to spell by the way) has made some new kind of crayon with his “ray of life” machine and now it’s attacking the crew. This is pretty much every issue but sometimes the crayon has a cowboy hat or an animal face.

It looks like the crayon is resisting their attacks and then they combine forces to defeat it. No moral, just violence for violence sakes.

Quotes: “ok” “I have an idea” “superblast!” “we win” You sure do Glueman, you sure do.

Teaser for issue #51 “In the next issue of Glueman and Crew can Notebook Girl survive in ice and snow world? All this in 51# (#51) of Glueman and Crew.” Notice how the paragraph starts in the middle of the page, goes down and finishes on top. Don’t ask me why.

For someone who can’t draw I don’t know why I do it so much. There are like over 80 of these things. Writing is pretty cool though you guys.

Glueman Extreme concept art because even childhood ideas get terrible edgy revamps.

Also here’s a bunch of cards from “Elemental Mech Duel” this Yu-Gi-Oh rip-off I made by taping drawings and rules to Harry Potter trading cards or something. This is probably the only chance I’ll have to bring this up too so why not?