 |
Required Reading For Those Out Of Time.
I've been cartooning since I was knee-high to a puddle duck, as my pop would say, and what started as a way to pass idle
time grew into a lifetime effort of honing and constantly improving my thing. At times, it was a means to
get attention, other times I wanted people to laugh, but the core reason for ever putting pencil to paper has been
expression. Escape follows close behind, but let's face it -- we never fully escape what's going on in our lives,
when it comes to self-expression. We can't count on whatever it is we do to always do that, whether you rebuild engines,
reconsider your approach to a personnel reorganizing effort, or even draw and write poetry. These things, at best suggest
some fragment of the larger picture forming in your head and heart.
 File Under Fire takes place in the outskirts of the kind of city the likes of Garfield or Mary Worth
would be set. It is across the landscape of this vast wasteland of cartoon suburbia, this wildern flipside of the American
Dream gone terribly strange, that the cast of File under Fire romps. Culture is a channel-flip away and all of
history is available on DVD in Blu-Ray or for fast download on an internet-ready laptop near you. A cigar-chomping mutt
named Fender leads the pack of unruly anthropamorphized mammals that make up the File Under Fire cast, as they
romp through the exaggerated '90's period in which the original comics were penned.
This was my first stab at an ensemble cast of characters, as diverse as they were perverse, in a sustainable format -- the
bi-weekly publishing of them as comicstrips in the Cal State University of Sacramento's State Hornet. My intention
was to author something along the lines of a crankier, '90's version of Berke Breathed's Bloom County and its
out-of-synch social commentary. What has resulted is both a bastardization of what I grew up with, an homage, and then again
something wholly and uniquely its own.
 I grew up on Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, on Shel Silverstein and Beatrix Potter. On the literary side, C.S. Lewis'
Narnia series, Lord of The Rings and classics like Huckleberry Finn and Bantam's Choose your Own
Adventure series played roles in my cartoon sensibilities of later years. Add to this a healthy dose of the Daily and
Sunday funnies, along with countless hours spent at the local library reading their collections of Mad Magazine and
various comic book titles ragged. And in the real world (remember that, all you PSP-playin', texting, iPhone fidgeting fools?) and growing up in the northwest, I was no
stranger to the local animal population either. It was a matter of time that my love of drawing anthropamorphized
cartoon animals and my skewed opinions on society would amalgamate into File Under Fire. And if not that, then
something damned near like it.
 To keep the
momentum going on a sweat-inducer like cartoon illustration, I welcomed music into my cartoon inspirational
process and R.E.M., Nirvana and a handful of other bands at the time became parents in the union of
weirdness that was File Under Fire. Described by one The Sacramento News And Review as a comic of "Trash-talking mammals", File Under Fire
was always my problem child. My ability leading up to and then doing are pretty straightforward. My reasons were many, but
my NEED to do File Under Fire is both simple and complicated. The simple reason is to offer something for
the wider public conscious and be heard, and hopefully be interacted with those you affect. The complicated reason is as
simple but only deceptively so.
What?
 The earliest
incarnation of what can now be described as File Under Fire is Fender, a
traditionally-formatted 4-panel comic strip from my senior year in high school on the newspaper staff. As many stories
with high school as their backdrop have a habit of being, the tale of File Under Fire came about
because of a girl. And my need to express myself to her at a time when I really couldn't express myself in person and by
normal means... like, oh say, WORDS.
The continuation of the whole thing transcended the desire
to be understood by one person and gradually became my way of making sense of and sometimes interfacing with the crazy
world I still see every frelling day. It became larger than its basic beginnings. So did the impact on who I was. What we
make has a habit of changing us. I believe that what we do is what we, in whole or in part, become. If my own trek is any indication, then those that express themselves in the most varied and intense ways were perhaps the
most shy at one point. People want and need to be heard and understood, sometimes through the most personal costly means.
From about 1992 till 1994, File Under Fire ran in CSUS' State Hornet. I briefly took classes at American River
College out in Carmichael, CA and along with this File Under Fire enjoyed cursing the pages of a whopping two or
three issues of the ARC school newspaper. The comic was by no means done after I left school. From 1995 till the late 90's,
File Under Fire would find a home within the family of publications and efforts of FAL, which those of of you on the
internet now know as FALnet. This brings us to now.
-- Tom Working
|
 |
