The Origins of ‘Me and Fred Savage’
Though I’d been writing and drawing for years, I first discovered I had a taste for writing and drawing comedy in university, after joining a university humor newspaper called Golden Words. For three years, as my grades started to slip from A’s to C’s, the paper slowly became the most important part of my weekly schedule. I became co-editor in my final year, and under my guidance the paper managed to garner a record number of slander lawsuits.
After graduation, I set up a Yahoo Group and invited a handful of former writers and editors from the paper, thinking we could post occasionally and keep in touch with each other. As we all became saddled with boring office jobs and whiled away our time in tiny cubicles, however, it didn’t take long before the group turned into an online recreation of our glory days, with everyone posting essays, reviews, cartoons and anything else we could come up with. Unfettered for the first time by the restraints of editorial policy or the opinions of readers, the new unwritten rule was to be as filthy and shocking as possible.
Over the years, the group expanded to contain an enormous and hilarious archive of cartoons (since erased, by the way, along with the image files of every other Yahoo Group last year. Thanks, Yahoo!). A lot of the content I’d made I later sold to magazines. But most of it just collected, and collected, and collected, until there was so much I eventually put up the website you’re now reading to house it all. A huge portion of this site, including the now-semi-famous Spider-Man comics, was originally created with the intention of amusing ten friends on a Yahoo Group.
Me and Fred Savage was my first attempt at a comic on the Group. It was also my first attempt at using Photoshop, and I’ll be blunt, it shows. If I’ve lingered so long in putting them up, it’s because the memory of Me and Fred Savage will always, like so much I wrote back then, hold up better than the content itself, whichs tends to feel like it was written by a completely different person with every passing year. It’s not embarrassing or anything — it’s just raw and awkward for me, like an animator finding their first clumsy attempts at a cartoon.
The various members of the Yahoo Group have since gone onto become a successful Hollywood screenwriter, a professional copy editor, the head writer of a popular sketch troupe, a video game programmer, a journalist, a lawyer, a doctor and more. A lot of talent there in one place at one time.
A lot of laughs, too.
Jay (Jan 2005)