By Micah Liesenfeld

About a decade ago, my son was attending a daycare center, and I met a guy named Gabe, who also had a son in the same institution for the toilet untamed. Our kids had a grand time playing in what they called “the garden,” which was actually just a raised flower bed of dirt and mosquitoes. There were no flowers. Not even a blade of grass. As soon as any green would peak above the dirt horizon, a zealous kid would stomp it out.

I met Gabe again a few months ago because our 11-year-old boys are attending the same middle school.

“Remember my magazine idea?” Gabe says. “It’s now a reality.”

“What a coincidence!” says I. “I’m getting serious about my comics.”

And so we agreed to allow our worlds to collide once again: I will happily supply SuppSTL with a comic strip on a regular basis. (I’m sure Gabe loves the way I’ve turned his publication’s title, Supplement St. Louis, into something football players might say as they slap butts in the locker room. “Sup’ Bro? SuppSTL!” I apologize but I’m writing this during the second week back to school from summer break, and my kids have once again given me the seasonal gift of rhinovirus scholasticus.)

But why am I telling you these things – and who am I? Here, I think this will help:

Way back in 1989, during my summer vacation before 5^th grade, I found myself in the Schnucks aisle where they kept the periodicals. It was the first time in my 10-year-old life that I had ever seen a comic book! I had collected comic strips from the newspaper and I had a pile of the Fawcett Crest Peanuts books, but floppy comic BOOKs were excitingly new to me. I flipped through Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, Justice League, X-Men – and in a carefully considered moment decided on my first-ever comic book purchase: The obvious choice . . . The Little Redbirds – a baseball comic that parodied our local franchise.

Youngster Micah’s first comic book purchase.

Seeing those comic books was like hearing a starter gun fire, and I have been making my own comics ever since. I made about 80(!) short comics books that summer. My comics were about tennis, dentists, kid detectives, and Xybots – a knock-off brand of Go-Bots, which was a knock-off brand of Transformers. (Somehow, I didn’t get the news that the most successful comics were usually about superheroes.)

The comics I collected as a kid included Speed Racer, Astro Boy, and Green Hornet, comics published by weird little companies – Now Comics, Eternity, Comico – that weren’t Marvel or DC.  

To spare you the boring middle-history, I’ll do a time warp to the here and now. Some of the comics I will publish in Supplement St. Louis are inspired by my family’s antics. My wife, Aicha, who hails from Burkina Faso, and I have two children, who will be given spiffy aliases in the comics (daughter “Eva” and son “Joshua”); we also have a pandemically-inspired adoption, a sparky dog named Spark.

11-year-old Micah spelled plaque properly but misspelled adventurs?

As a kid, I hated the sappy newspaper comics, such as The Family Circus or For Better or For Worse. And I also hated most of the other family comics, the ones which incessantly tapped the comedy vein of “Kids say the darndest things.” Give me Calvin and Hobbs or the Segar-era Popeye. I want the strips to look like they might just go off the rails!

I am old-er now, but you knew that the minute I mentioned reading comics in a grocery store. I’ve always been an old soul who is young at heart: That’s why I want my comics to be spunky as a youngster and straight-shooting as an oldster. (Good luck to me.)

With that, I present to you the first in a series of comics for Supplement St. Louis. This one stars my daughter, who has a rare genetic disease that makes it difficult to walk. I’m in the process of making a memoir comic series that focuses on how my family deals with her illness, Ataxia Telangiectasia. It’s a serious situation, but comics are good at handling that, too. I exhibited the first issue of this memoir at the Short Run Comix Festival in Seattle last year, and this year I premiered the second issue at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus in Ohio.

In the future, I will also be presenting issues and phenomena that I run into while I wander our region. Perhaps I will be triggered by an interesting piece of idiocy or something positively amazing. Who knows? My ears are pricked, my eyes are open, and my drawing tools are loaded.

My first SuppSTL comic, below, takes us to the beautiful – and beautifully free – Saint Louis Art Museum.

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