I drew the story on notebook paper, page by page, day by day, usually at school but sometimes at home. It wound up being in four parts (each part with its own title page and credits), with each part stapled, and as each one was finished, it got passed around to our friends at school to read.

It was never really a conscious project. By that I mean, we never really got together with the express purpose of working on the story, and we certainly never thought, while it was being created, of what would happen to it afterward. We didn’t sit down with the idea of “let’s write a Tiny Toons script” (especially since it wasn’t actually a script), and we certainly didn’t start out with a notion of sending it anywhere. It was something to do. It was fun. We put things into it that were fun for us, little in-jokes our classmates would get — we had the boring history teacher narrating the History of Q-Tips, we had a fake credit of “Person Who Can’t Draw: Sarah Creef” (apparently to acknowledge that while I did most of the art and Amy did a couple drawings of Elmyra, Sarah’s contributions were story only), and another fake credit poking fun at our English teacher. One gag — the overflowing tub of bubbles — I even stole from a story my sister and then brother-in-law told from their honeymoon.

(This is probably a good place to remind my family to watch what stories you tell around me. Just saying.)

There were no thoughts, at that time, about the end product. It was all about making and sharing, and looking back on it, I love that innocence. That’s the kind of creativity Thirty-Eight spends a lot of time trying to recapture these days, of what it was like to do something without worrying about the fate of the end product. Really, there wasn’t a lot to do in our hometown back then, especially at that in-between age, so you had to be able to make your own fun or you usually wound up getting in a lot of trouble instead, just out of boredom.

So. All we needed now was an ending…

I was trying to finish Part Four (and hopefully end the story), but I couldn’t think of an ending. Finally I got kind of frustrated and decided to stop for a while.

Well, just then Amy called. She suggested an ending, and I used it. Her idea was to have Babs and Buster go on a cruise, get shipwrecked, and float (in a two-man life raft) back to Acme Acres.

I now know that the idea came to her in a dream. I asked why she had never told me that she dreamt the idea. She replied, “If I had, you wouldn’t have used it.”

Maybe she’s right.

The story was done, about 120 pages or so of three-ring notebook paper, four parts stapled and stacked. And it probably would have ended there, with a story stuck in a drawer someplace, a little creative relic of junior high, but people at school kept saying, “You should send that somewhere. You should send it to Steven Spielberg.”

I kind of laughed and replied, “Maybe I will, if I can find the address.”

 

Up next: Signed, sealed, delivered — again and again and again…