001 - On Establishing a Platform to Attract Attention or Why is Marc such an Attention Whore?

Back in 1996 my father sold Baker Rubber, Inc. to a company in Toronto. National Rubber assumed control of our two nice tire recycling facilities in Pennsylvania and Arizona and gutted our obsolete shithole of a plant in South Bend. Later in the year they gutted my dad and brother, tossed them off like the discarded tires that we used as our raw material.

National left me alone in downriver Detroit as I was helping them start up another production site. Cathy was pregnant with our second child and I needed to stay for the health insurance until Riley fought his way out of the womb. Then I quit and came back to South Bend to see if I could make a business out of the fifty-year-old rubber chunking plant.

My Family's Legacy

I tried for about three years. I’m not sure if it was lack of business acumen, lack of desire to see it succeed or the inherent market difficulties that led to its demise, but Millennial Materials, Inc. went under about the same time that the kitschy-ness of its name wore off in 2000.

I worked hard in the first year or so, reconnecting with old clients, searching for new ones, setting up the business, re-architecting the production lines, standing side by side with the small workforce to push finished goods out the door. We established a baseline of business but I didn’t sustain it and definitely didn’t expand it, but I did re-discover my love for drawing comics and telling stories using sequential art.

I dusted off an old idea, namely that of assembling a group of disparate characters and throwing them into a room with the notion that their very disparity would lead to interesting conflict. It was an idea I’d loved since my teens that emerged in fits and farts throughout college in a failed attempt at a novel called Cry Freedom, re-emerged under the same name as a prequel of sorts in comic form during this period, and would eventually culminate in a god-awful screenplay called Cardboard Freedom.

The comic version told six back stories of the six lead characters that would eventually gather in the room. Each was crudely rendered on art board with pencils and inks and word balloons. The art boards were run through a black and white copier, folded in half, and stapled at the spine to form a twelve page mini-comic. In my final year with my failing company, I’d work on the comic during the day between stints on the line throwing tires on a conveyor belt – good right brain / left brain exercise. I even found an artist for my final two issues – kind of cool seeing someone else’s take on my story (plus he drew way way better).

As was the custom at the time, the last page contained the writer’s thoughts on his comic and reaction to his reader’s feedback on same – a letters to the editor page made in the incomparable manner of Stan’s Soapbox, Stan Lee’s fireside chat with his fans that appeared in Marvel mags of the late 20th century.

See? The wolf is howling. For freedom. Get it? I understand if you don't, cuz 25 years later, I don't.

I titled the commentary on this back page The Inane Ramblings of a Man-Child Named Marc. The “inane ramblings” part was an attempt to be self-deprecating and wink to the reader that I was in on the joke that my thoughts could not be of any more import than those of any other Joe Lunchbox. The “man-child” was a nod to my own immaturity as a thirty-year-old with two children and a third soon to arrive that still saw himself as a beer-swilling Beavis of sixteen.

I’m not sure much has changed since hitting fifty. Sure, my back aches more and I need to turn the TV volume to 16 instead of 12, but I still laugh at dick and fart jokes and love superheroes so the man-child moniker holds.

My goal for this blog is to encourage a community of like minds to interact, converse, debate, laugh and generally pay attention to me (“Hi, Marc, we see you.”). It is a forum for my works – old stuff to make fun of and new stuff to promote that you hopefully won’t make as much fun of.

Please join me – be inane, be childish. Children see the wonder in the world. I think we need more of that.