This story has a story of its own. When given assignments, I like to work within the framework of rules but in unexpected ways. In this case, I was in a creative writing class as a freshman in college and turned in a hand-drawn and lettered children’s story rather than the usual typed manuscript. The class didn’t have a clue how to treat it when we sat down to critique each other’s work, and I had a good laugh at their reactions. Something about the story kept rattling around in my brain though, and so a few years later I rewrote it in a better and more condensed form, and drew all new and polished b&w art to replace the crude sketches of the original piece. Here I’ve scanned in the artwork for your enjoyment as an online flipbook. And I suppose when I have time I will add color to the scans to give the art a little more pizzazz (and because I always wanted to).

I still enjoy the story, though the television references in it now are even more dated than when I wrote it. And calling the cartoon creatures “Fax” was simply a serendipitous coincidence – at the time, it was just a short nonsense name that sounded good to me. Looking back, the story’s premise and its anti-television stance now seem as quaint as the antenna-sporting cartoon TVs I drew. We are now immersed in a sea of distracting devices far beyond anything I imagined at the time.