Introduction

The year was 2002. I was a lonely young lad attending high school. The World Trade Center, a huge building I had never before heard of, had recently been destroyed by a couple of hijacked jets, killing thousands of clueless, ordinary people. Some kid in my school had lynched himself, my dad had just had an operation to remove a cancerous growth, and I was beginning to realize how pointless life seemed in the face of death. Questions about truth, meaning, and mortality reverberated through my chemically imbalanced brain, and I knew I had to find a way out. The way out was not an answer, as such, but rather, a means of laughing at the absence of an answer.

Little round people with no mouths, no ears, no distinguishing characteristics, began to appear in my sketchbooks, proclaiming their worth loudly before inevitably dying in some strange and completely meaningless manner. I thought the comics were funny. I showed them to some friends, and they seemed vaguely concerned for my mental health.

I realize these comics are weird, morbid, and at times, perhaps even offensive. But they are, in some small way, a part of me, and I've grown fond of them. I've written this small preamble so that you, the hapless reader, may not view the comics as an insensitive declamation of life, but rather as what they are: a way for an overly sensitive fellow to laugh at that which he fears the most. What do I fear the most? Not death, oddly enough, but rather, insignificance---the possibility that everything I do, and that everything everyone does, may amount to nothing at all in the end.

Some of the comics that will be appearing here are originals from those lonely high school days, but many were drawn years afterwards, and every so often, I draw more. For some reason, I never quite grew out of these little guys, so maybe someone out there will derive some strange enjoyment from them.

-JMT-