So, this storyline got really nasty, really fast. And I have to explain why.

This was drawn shortly after my girlfriend of 6 months dumped me cold. I thought we had a great relationship, as we never really fought, seemed to be mutually physically attracted to each other, and I endearingly based Chrusher's girlfriend in the comics after her. In fact, the missing "ripped up" comics that Ray's friend threw away had a lot of the interaction between our characters -- "Chrusher and Saber-Sam" sleuthing the bad guys out while Chrusher was always trying to get some, but she would coyly fight off his clumsy advances. But sadly, none of that survived and I have only the vaguest memories of some good artwork in them. She was more or less the first female character and I was starting to get better drawing female bodies instead of just males, something I would've loved to still have and show on my website here. 

Now, the reason we broke up had very little to do with me. She fought with her parents a lot, and while I was a good listener and tried to be an understanding partner, it did become very monotonous to hear about and read (in our supposed "love letters") about her immense anger and resentment of her mother. There was little I could do but just listen and tried to cheer her up any way I could. But... this wasn't enough, and I was too naive to see it coming. She wanted to run away with a guy (and did so more than once, apparently) and move out. We were both only 15-years old at the time, and I had a very protective Italian-American mom who never really trusted her anyways (that mom intuition maybe sensed that she wasn't as into me as I was into her at the time, but I digress) so that was not something I could do. Hence I got dropped like a hot potato. Even though I was a little brokenhearted, we agreed that we were supposed to remain friends, since I was so shy around girls and introverted in high school, I thought that we kind of agreed that she would introduce me to some of her girl friends (not that she had many then, tho). That was something I was completely fine with. Who knows, maybe we'd either get back together or meet new mutual significant others and live happily ever after, right?

But that didn't happen. She moved on very fast, dated a few guys very quickly out of absolutely nowhere, which blew my mind, and when I actually had friends pointed out how quickly that happened (and how bad it made her look on top of how little of a man it made me feel), I got embarrassed and mad. Made me look like a simp, or inadequate or something. She also actually VERY publicly slapped me in the face outside of the school after someone reputedly repeatedly wrote that she was a slut on a study hall table, which certainly did not help my embarrassment and angst.

It hurt to have a young woman who just dumped me and move on so quickly still have a main character based on her in my comic, so I needed to explain how she wasn't going to be in my comics anymore. Well... so I was an immature, heartbroken, and now suddenly bitter 15-year-old, so in my teenage angst, I took out some resentment, embarrassment, and frustration by making her an exceedingly brutal victim to Chrusher's vicious, vengeful, and murderous arch nemesis -- The Obliterator. 

Oof... 

In real life, thankfully she did not meet that end. She wound up running away with a guy (her ex before me, I believe), got pregnant, left high school for a GED and got married. Years later we are friends on social media, she's married to her second husband, I'm still married to my first (oddly enough, who I married around the time she got divorced), and she has grandkids around the same age as my kids, which showed how I wasn't ready for kids when I was 15, and she probably wasn't gonna wait to have kids when I did (my concern was having a job, which I -- just like most teenagers -- didn't have back then), so strange for it to work out that way, for sure.

But I harbor absolutely zero bad feelings for her now, and felt bad that this comic made her look, well, a little underhanded and slutty. But they are a part of the comic and here they are. I can't just erase it. It was part of the story that moved the plot along and explained why a character was never seen again.

Oddly, our mutual friend Ray actually SHOWED this comic to her years later after I web-published it (she had never seen it, but may have heard about them), and she joked back and forth with me about them, so I felt better about it instead of embarrassed and guilty that I took out my anger on her fictional avatar back then. But, in hindsight, they give a little gravitas that the stakes were high in the storyline, as someone -- even a main character -- could get killed on the very next page.