Comics, like every other form of communication, have to deliver what that grizzled old-timey journalists call "The Five W's" - Who, What, When, Why, and Where... is the big W under which the money is burie - sorry, I thought I was writing about "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" there for a minute. Most comics manage to nail most of those W's. But it's the "why" that really trips a lot of these comics up, why the hell were they ever made in the first place, and that's the question we'll be asking a lot of today, when we look at... well, okay, this one is tough on the "what" as well.


"The Drafting Warriors" - great, a comic book about those auto racers who get real close to the other cars and ride along in the column of fast-moving air left in their wake. At least that's what I'm assuming. Been a while since we covered any racing comics! The nuclear fireball on the cover? Well I'm sure it's just symbolic of their firey race tactics, or an accident in the pit.


I stand corrected! That nuclear fireball was the result of mystical Canadian Inca sorcerers blasting their entire city into cosmic dust, right there on page one.


And thousands of years later, that vast scene of devastation and horror returns in a slightly different form as Ottawa, the capital of Canada - specifically Ottawa Technical High School, surely an edifice to rival the most imposing of lost Inca temples.


No auto racing, sorry. This comic book is by and about high school students, starring self-insert versions of those same high school students, and the only drafting we're going to get involves T-squares and mechanical pencils and maybe those little erasing shields, a situation so unbearable that even the caption boxes are apologizing and promising it will all be over soon. And we're only on page 2! Not a good sign.


It's one thing to make a charming lo-fi comic that pokes gentle fun at your high school art teacher in a story that your classmates might find amusing. It's another thing entirely to put it in print and deliver it to comic shops across the country, because I'm pretty sure most of those customers didn't attend your high school.

Also: is this a drafting or technical drawing class? No. It's just a regular art type drawing class. Why isn't this a drafting class? You had ONE JOB, comic


Ferral, last king of the lost Canuck Incas, appears in spirit form to remind us that when sorcery is outlawed, only outlaws will use sorcery!


One day Ferral realized that the only way to keep all the evil magic-abusers from destroying their entire civilization was to... destroy their entire civilization and everything in it, and then commission a detailed color painting of the explosion and put that image on the cover of a comic book about "drafting warriors" in order to confuse readers.


"Chris! Kevin! Other Chris! Doug! You have been chosen to embody the power force of thousands of massacred Inca - power that has been building for "mellenia" - and become heroes limited only by your imaginations, and by the drafting tools that happen to be in front of the person writing this story at this very minute!"


Inca, schminca, this just looks like Chris #2 in a weird hat.


I bet you didn't wake up this morning thinking you were going to read a comic book where four Ottawa teens dressed in drafting-inspired superhero regalia use their belt gemstones to enter other dimensions on the orders of the floating head of an Incan sorcerer. And why would you?


Somewhere around this page is where the artist really starts to regret giving his characters these complicated and hard to draw costumes.


We were promised a 13th Dimension filled with evil sorcery-abusing Incan spirits, but instead it's a dimension that merely keeps the hot side hot and the cold side cold. Not that this isn't special.


In the seventh dimension, no harm can occur. Except harm to things like "coherence" and "readability" - those things are getting harmed plenty.


Any time anyone says "you know, we really ought to make a comic out of this," well, don't.

Look, I'm not against the idea of this comic book! It's a goofy fun thing to do, to make a comic story starring your high school friends and teachers. I've done it myself. What I didn't do was print up a few thousand of the things and distribute it internationally. Because that would be silly!


Ottawa Technical High School is now posessed by evil magic-abusing Incan wizards freed from their 13th dimensional prison. This certainly explains the careers of (frantically searches for famous graduates of the Ottawa Technical High School)... uh, three CFL players and an architect. That's it, that's all I have to work with. Sorry.


And now the question is, why there isn't a comic called "The Shorts Too Tight Boys?" Maybe that's a better name for a band? Freeze Sucker and the Shorts Too Tight Boys, appearing live Tuesdays at the Uptown.


I assume this sequence makes sense for all the people who took this guy's music class. The rest of us? Just confused.


The limitless potential of Graphical Storytelling - The Ninth Art - is demonstrated in all its power here, as four teens dressed in super-powered technical drawing costumes fly around stalking a music teacher.


"Waiting for something spectacular to happen" is kind of this comic's entire game plan. I was expecting at least a page of these goofs using their graphic-arts-adjacent super powers to battle, I dunno, what's the natural enemy of draftsmen? A skewed T-square? Mechanical pencil lead breaking? Lower back pain? Instead it's been like every other self-published black and white super hero comic from the 80s - all backstory and setup, no payoff, not for the readers, not for anyone who ever expected to recoup their costs in publishing this mess.


And, before anything exciting can happen, wham, after just ten pages this epic runs out of steam and will have to be continued next time. Which, well, I hate to dash hopes, but don't hold your breath.


What's more important than story is a detailed description of the characters, their place of birth, marital status, height, weight, and eye color. Just think, we could have had pages of Drafting Warriors doing warrior war stuff, but no, instead we get a loan application.


I see their skin color is listed as "normal," which, as the saying goes, sounds about white.


Oh yeah, gonna rush to the store and set up my sleeping bag on the sidewalk waiting for the next ten pages of whatever they can finish before they graduate, definitely this is gonna come out. For sure.


Of course it looks like whatever they have planned for the next issue is going to delve deep into the kind of material that would get you a session with the high school guidance counselor and maybe a psychiatrist, and maybe a life drawing instructor. This is one Draft(ing Warriors) we don't want to dodge!

So what have we learned? Keep your high school self-insert super drafting people comics to yourself and your high school chums and that art teacher who encouraged you, and maybe don't bother the rest of us who don't find this amusing or relatable because we obviously weren't there? Yes.

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