Welcome to the cKotch.Com blog. I’m Christopher Kotcher, and this is the story of my other major literary project.
Comic Beginnings
My eighth grade English class featured writing units in between grammar units. These writing units were based around yearlong groups.
Each unit gave each group receiving one of several color-coded binders. Binders had all kinds of different project themes. Persuasion, research, speech.
But the most memorable one for me was the purple one. The journalism project.
Apparently, our school had an online newspaper. Who knew?
We would each provide one factual article and one fun segment. I chose to create a history article and comic. Creating a comic seemed the most natural extension of my creativity. And indeed, it was.
This assignment would birth one of my flagship characters. Charlie the Crusader.
How Things Fell Together
Choosing a character was simple enough.
My character would be for a school newspaper, so I would honor the school. The school mascot was the OLGC Crusaders, so I made my character a crusader.
He was meant to be a cartoon version of the crusader in the school symbol. After all, newspaper comics tend to be silly.
My crusader had a big head and small body. The cross on his armor took up most of his body. The feather on his helmet and the cape on his shoulders were fairly big too. They were made green and yellow to match the school’s colors of green and gold.
Thanks to my crusader’s helmet, his eyes were the only visible part of his face. This forced me to be creative when drawing emotions and reactions. So many things needed to be conveyed with the eyes. Every wink, scrunch, or widening needed to mean something.
To help show emotion, I also made his reaction affect his feather and cape. Excitement of any kind could make them stand straight up in the air. More subdued reactions could make them hang low.
How the crusader held his weapons was another good emotional tell. That could show everything from determination and anger to hope and inspiration.
For my crusader’s name, I chose Charlie. It was a common, everyday name to make my fantasy hero more relatable. Plus, the name has always been popular for comedic characters.
Creating Charlie the Crusader’s world would prove more difficult.
At first, I planned a simple “rescue the princess” story.
A bumbling old magician named Solos would try teleporting Charlie to the lair of the princess’s captor, a magic dragon named Lunos. Solos’s haywire spells would force Charlie to fight past increasingly ridiculous scenarios during his quest. In the end, the princess would reveal the ordeal was merely a test of bravery. Though Lunos would comment it was actually just a prank.
This original story was planned but never made.
The supporting characters seemed uninteresting. The plot was overdone, even as a parody. The final joke even seemed more harsh than funny.
I stepped back and refocused on having a simple plot in a wild fantasy setting.
I removed Solos and the princess for the time being. Lunos became a young, hot-headed dragon named Drake.
Since the comic was for a school paper, I picked a classic schoolyard plot. Drake would steal Charlie’s lunch, and Charlie would chase him across the land to get it back. Comedic situations would emerge along the way.
Keeping Things Going
Only my English teacher read my comic in the school’s online newspaper. No one else really knew the page even existed.
Still, I felt I had made something special. I continued Charlie the Crusader’s story.
My dad found my first three comics and could not stop laughing. He praised how (paraphrased) “Flipping Hilarious” they were. This led me to name the series The Hilarious Quests of Charlie the Crusader.
I came to organize my comics into volumes of ten. Standard comics lasted anywhere from three to ten pages. Each volume featured a more plot-focused miniseries told across four to five comics. Volumes typically ended with comics starring Solos’s replacement Max, a young out-of-practice magician.
I never published this work or even officially recognized it as one of my major projects. This was a hobby in between my larger written works.
By high school’s end, my main series ended with 26 total volumes. Prequel and sequel series were planned but never started. Instead, I decided to touch up and color my older issues. I wanted to bring them to my later stuff’s same quality standards.
Things Slow Down
Coloring comics lasted through my freshmen year of college. I just stopped at Volume 10 and never went back.
I had limited time for writing and wanted to focus on revising my lifelong literary project Story Chronicles again. Later in college, my poems took a pretty good chunk of my time too. The only time left for Charlie and friends would be doodling them in my planners and notebooks.
My few attempts to go back to my comics followed a usual pattern. Some parts made me laugh. Others made me shake my head and wonder what I was thinking.
Things seemed random and silly far too often. By the end of the series, I would explain nonsense as the result of “cosmic radiation” or “random spatial distortions.” The wackier and sillier filler contrasted way too much from the increasingly serious miniseries stories.
Still, I did love the characters and like the miniseries’ plots. The comics’ wider, daily world was just no longer something I enjoyed.
When I finished my college draft of Story Chronicles, a new writing project was needed. Nothing big seemed apparent though. So, I tried increasing my poem production to fill the gap.
Then student teaching came.
You see, for me, poems come from one of two sources. Relaxed reflection of my thoughts and interesting ideas which have been rolling around in my head.
Neither condition could be present during student teaching’s intense workloads. I hardly felt I had time for anything aside from working and sleeping. I began to worry that my writing may fade for a time. That I may lose everything and have to start over from the beginning.
Then something strange happened.
The very thing which had been limiting my writing led me to my next project.
A Medium Change
Like always, my elective mythology class came to the rescue.
Teaching this class reminded me of the mythological structures under all stories. In particular, Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero’s Journey.
Heroes enter unknown worlds to fix problems in their known worlds. Along the way, their quests mature these heroes into their best selves.
Lecturing on these great ideas made me want to make a story specifically rooted in mythological structures. Something epic that could be my own twist in this most classic myth.
Over time, I realized I already had such a capable character. I had Charlie the Crusader. His random world may have parodied hero stories, but he still held ideals of heroism at his core.
Maybe all his story needed was a world grounded in more proper mythological principles.
And so, Charlie the Crusader finally officially shifted from mere hobby to serious project.
In this process, I switched the story from comics to purely written works.
Writing has been my main craft. I know how to write better than I know how to make comics. Removing the story’s visual elements was a bit painful considering all my work in character designs and Charlie’s reactions. Still, this was the best to remove the world’s more nonsensical visual gags.
I was excited about this project. I actually undertook this major revision before fully knowing what Charlie’s new format would be. Novels? Short Stories? Collections?
I simply started by converting individual comics from the first few volumes. Then I saw ways to string together the miniseries’ plots through common threads and themes.
Stories in between plot-heavier moments develop character relationships and build the world around them.
The result is a book based on my first five comic volumes. It is something between a novel and a collection. Some parts read as chapters while others read as character stories bound together. It is an odd plot structure but one that feels right for my purposes.
The book begins with a slight addition to the Hero’s Journey. Charlie comes to know and find a home in a land he is called to protect as a crusader. Various adventures build up to the perfect moment for Charlie to reflect on his growth.
And of course, plenty of room for new quest and growth is provided. After all, I do still have over 20 more volumes of comics to convert into this new format. I want to tell Charlie the Crusader’s full story.
Kotcher’s Call to Action
Charlie the Crusader is now featured in the cKotch.Com portfolio. Feel free to read the new version of Charlie’s quest to reclaim his lunch from Drake. You can also check out the original comic version both in the original black and white and in color. Witness all the stages of Charlie’s development.
Also, if you like my content and wish to see more, then you have a few options.
You could check out my book Five Strange Stories on Amazon. Five Strange Stories is enrolled in the Kindle Matchbook program, so anyone who buys the paperback can also get the eBook for free.
You can also check my Essential Posts page for links to some of my greatest posts to the cKotch.Com blog.
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