ChrusherComix (AKA Chris’ Crusher Comics) is technically the third cartoon series done by amateur/immature cartoonist Christopher Galletta Stevens (AKA me), as it had at least two unpublished predecessors:
First up was when in elementary school during the mid-1980s, I did something called “Mr. Butts Comics”. In fact, to this day, I still have them. The comics weren’t terribly funny or exceedingly well-drawn, but they were creative and impressive for a kid between 5-12 years old with a lot of stupidity, fart jokes and fat jokes. Mr. Butts was a short but very strong, shy, honest, egg-shaped man with round prescription sunglasses on his otherwise hairless other than a pencil tip of hair on the very top of his rather oblong skull. He ha a VERY hairy wife (because when I was a little kid I didn’t know how to draw girls very well, haha!), a teenage rocker son and a very strong baby. He was a school teacher, bowler, scientist, a surfer, and a pro-wrestler (busy man, I know!). Mr. Butts has a few small cameos in these early 1988-89 Crusher comics, and I’ll point them out in the descriptions.
Remembering the (Mis)Adventures of Mike Butski (1987)
Then, in Middle School, a classmate of mine inspired some wwwwaaaayyyyyy-out-there comics about a kid that kinda’ looked a lil’ like him but did some really perverse things. Such as being in a bed with various animals (including dogs), stealing from salvation army drop-off boxes, and a highly memorable one of him being reprimanded (with double entendres) by a weird music teacher in his personal side-office with a ripped condom wrapper outside of the door. So bad were these comics, that they were confiscated by the teachers and my mom called into the school office, sternly telling her how messed up her son was to draw this stuff (honestly, I don’t even know how I thought of it at 12-13 years old… I think my classmates, including the inspirational subject of the comics himself – gave me ideas and laughed when I drew them!). When she left, she could have SWORN that she heard them laughing at the comics! Regardless, they kept them. And a few of these “flashback/preview” ads are all I had of them. Yet, the most memorable of them wound up being re-drawn in the Crusher Comics in the forthcoming few years of comics. En-frickn-joy.
