The First Milk & Cheese Comic (And The M&C Story)

As I think I mentioned, my friend Tom Lynch dropped by the signing I did last month at JHU Comics and gave me the original art for the first Milk & Cheese comic. Unfortunately, the art was badly water damaged (due to a basement flood, something that occurs often here on Staten Island),. Tom had kept it afterward in plastic and I've slipped them, within the plastic, into my M&C portfolio.

They're pretty messed up but I'm pretty happy to have them again in my possession. I gave them to Tom way back in the day as thanks for helping me with graphic design work on my comics and whatnot. He designed the second Pirate Corp$! logo, did some interior design work on a few comics, business cards and two stamps (one of which I still use on the back of original art, when I remember to stamp them). Tom also worked as art director for my first publisher, Eternity Comics, while they were in Brooklyn, and he did a bunch of design jobs for Jim Hanley's Universe, now JHU Comics, on Staten Island. We go back to art class in New Dorp High School, where he and Mark Admundsen got me back into comics, pushing the Wolfman and Perez New Teen Titans on me. I wasn't following comics at the time but when they told me what was going on at DC (Marvel creators crossing over, like Wolfman, Perez etc) i picked up a copy of Tales of the Teen Titans to see what was up, because I had been a huge george Perez fan when he was at Marvel. Anyway, long story short, I fell hard for the comic and it re-sparked my interest and I became a comic book buyer and reader again. I was getting my comics at Paul's Sweet Shop (infamous on the Island for several reasons, all bad) in New Dorp, and switched to The Fantastic Store when it oepned a few blocks away on New Dorp Lane. This became my local comic shop and a place of employment (I was fired but Jim Hanley hired me when he left to open JHU). I'm still friends with people from those days, some of them my best friends. Crazy.

Anyway, yeah, those first two pages. I've told the story of where M&C came from before, but here it goes again while these pages are making me feel nostalgic:

Milk & Cheese were first drawn on a napkin at a Mexican restaurant while waitng for food with my friends Brian David-Marshall and Tony Eng from Eternity Comics (both of whom I am still lifelong friends with). We'd been to a ska show at CBGB's and were pretty beer-soaked. At least I know I was, I can't account for Brian and Tony because I was too drunk to notice much. I'm assuming they were also plotzed. Anyway, I used to draw on restaurant napkins a lot back in the 80s (nowadays I never carry a pen with me) and while waiting for our order I drew a carton of Milk and a wedge of Cheese on a highway saying something like, "We're from New Jersey! No cracks!". Brian kept the napkin. I guess it dates back to 1987 (?).

I realized I have a scan of the napkin from Brian so here it is:

There was obviously something about the two characters that I liked, because I kept drawing them. Mostly on envelopes and packages that I was sending out to friends or to comics publishers. I had a toe dipped into comics because of Pirate Corp$! and was looking for work, so I'd send stuff out. Eventually I was trying to find a publisher for PC$! after Eternity canceled it. I sent copies to people I had met from going to SDCC, Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics, and Bob Schreck who I think was either at Comico or Dark Horse by that time. And I'd always draw M&C making some jokes on the packages. I tried to place some spot illos in Amazing Heroes (which rejected me, then accepted a few) and I would draw them on the packages I sent. So I got into a habit of drawing the characters, on envelopes and personal letters.

At some point I started using the phrase "Dairy Products Gone Sour" to describe the characters. Jim Hanley kept telling me to call them "Dairy Products Gone Bad". I remember resisting the change for a while, but obviously I changed my mind. I'm glad Jim made the suggestion!

When I went to SDCC in 1988 I managed to get a table in artist's alley even though I had no comics work going at the time. Pirate Corp$! was cancelled and I was looking for a new publisher (which I did, but that's another story involving alcohol). I didn't have anything to really push at my table except art and sketch commissions. People would come up to my table, ask me what I did, and pretty much lose interest because they didn't hear anything about Marvel or DC characters. But I was an artist behind a convention table, so even though they never heard of me (or others in the same career position) a lot of them would still ask for a sketch. Because, it's free, so what the hell.

But who to draw? I had no experience at Marvel or DC so there wasn't a mainstream character I had any relationship with. Almost no one was interested in the PC$! characters. So, out of boredom and defensivess, I drew Milk & Cheese in their sketchbooks or on backing boards. They were quick and easy, for one thing. And I would draw them saying mean and rude things about comics. Which made it fun. between the enveope drawings and the con sketches I developed their boisterous and mean-spiritied personalities. Kids and adults would come up to me and I'd draw M&C telling them to burn their comics, that comics were rotting their brains, that they should stop buying comics because that was money they could be spending on beer, that superheroes sucked and comics were worthless. That sort of thing. People laughed.

Two of the people that laughed were Kurt Sayenga and Steve Niles. We struck up a running conversation during the convention, probably because they were also bored and we were wearing t-shirts for weird bands (in pre-Hot Topic days seeing a weird band shirt pretty much meant you'd spotted a like-minded weirdo you could nod to in the street). Kurt Sayenga was doing album design for Dischord records and Steve Niles had been in the band Gray Matter (on Dischord). Kurt Sayenga was running Greed Magazine, which Steve was also involved with. Kurt said if I ever did a comic with Milk & Cheese, he'd run it in Greed. And that's how the first comic happened. I drew a two-page strip, which ran in Greed #6

Unfortunately, that was the final issue of Greed. I was really bummed out when Greed collapsed (something happened with the financial backer from what I recall) because I was set to do another comic for it. I'm someone who is pretty anxious about things and I get comfortable dealing with people I've already dealt with. Looking for new outlets for my work has always been difficult for me, I'm someone who used to mostly sit and wait and hope. Back in the day, this worked out well (not so much the last ten or fifteen years). Because of the Greed appearance, I was asked to do more M&C comics for a new independent anthology that was starting up (I think it was called Asylum). I did a few comics before Asylum collapsed before publishing a single issue (a typical occurence in the post-B&W boom and bust days, there have been other comics out called Asylum that came out later). Later on I did a single M&C page for an issue of Cerebus Bi-Weekly (there was a call for submissions and I didn't know Dave Sim was a garbage pile at the time), and I did at least one or two M&C comics for X-Magazine after Jeff Hansen contacted me. THis is how I had a small pile of M&C pages by 1991, when I asked Dan Vado at SLG -- who had taken on Pirate Corp$!/Hectic Planet -- if he'd be interested in publishing a Milk & Cheese comic. He said something like, "Sure, why the hell not?". I drew some new comics to round out the issue, including "Merv Griffin", and the comic ended up doing really well (for a b&w small press comic, at least). It went through nine printings, and I did six more issues and a mini-comic with the characters. A lot of the comics featured material reprinted from Deadline, Deadline USA, Dark Horse Presents, Wizard Magazine, Oni Double-Feature and Sarah's mad Planet zine. The first M&C collection was published in 1994, since then there's almost always been a M&C collection in print between SLG and Dark Horse Comics (the hardcover and softcover collections from DHC are both out of print, but as everyone knows M&C cannot be kept down for long).

Anyway. Those first two pages.

They looked pretty bad even before they got water damaged. But everything has to start somewhere, and there was clearly some kind of idiot ugly charm to those early Milk & Cheese comics that clicked with some folks. You can see how the characters -- and my artwork -- evolved over the years by comparing the first pages with two later pieces of art. Practice does pay off, although I never was much for drawing for the sake of drawing. I mostly improved my drawing by making more comics pages, I always preferred drawing comics over drawing illustrations. Which is one reason it took a long time for art to "mature" and start looking like something interesting on its own (and I started getting any serious illo/magazine/animation work). My art isn't my selling point, at least it isn't in my eyes. It's the art plus the writing, it's the ideas and the jokes -- the cartooning -- that I think I'm best at. I'm not the best artist or writer, but I'm pretty good at putting words and pictures together. I guess that's why I almost always use word balloons and dialogue in my pinups and commissions. At heart I am a sit down comedian, I draw the jokes and punchlines. While talking a lot about other nonsense.

I love Milk & Cheese and am glad things worked out to get them into comics where they belonged. Those early comics make me wince, they're like old photos of your worst haircuts and shirts, but they were the foundation for what came after and were directly responsible for the Space Ghost Coast to Coast gig and much of the comics and animation work I got back in the day. It's weird to know where the first drawing and the first pages are now (Brian has the framed napkin on a wall in his home office. He won't burn the pnapkin like I keep asking him to -- it has stains on it! It makes me crazy!).

Speaking of crazy, here's one of the last M&C comics I drew. Will there ever be others? I've been saying I'd like to do a few new M&C comics for a long time now, so, I don't know. Maybe. There's certainly plenty to hate these days. But whether or not I make any new comics, I'll always be drawing them for one thing or another, because they're my babies. I can't believe anyone still likes them after all this time, with no new comics having come out in many years. I'm grateful they still have fans. They've had a pretty good run for a drunken napkin drawing.

Colors by Sarah Dyer