[Groop] Where were you?

[Tone]

	I was a young kid growing up in New York City, but for a couple
of years my parents bought/invested in a nice house in Long Beach, Long
Island as a summer/weekend house. It was within walking/biking distance
to the beach, but I ended up getting roped into having to mow the lawn
whenever I would go to the house. It quickly became less and less fun
for me to go. My dad did give me some cash as compensation, but it
usually was not worth it for me to be driven there for over and hour,
mow the lawn within another two, then have to hang out and do nothing
for several hours to wait for the hour-plus drive back home. Sometimes
we would end up spending the night, which sucked even more. Eventually
my dad realized he could not get me to come out to the house and he
started letting me invite my friends.
	When I was able to bring a friend along to the house and I got
the lawn mowing done with, we would usually explore the neighborhood on
crappy used bikes my dad bought at some garage sale. We quickly
discovered a comic shop pretty close to the house. I was never into
comics, but a couple of my friends and their older brothers were into
them, so we obviously went in. While my friend was checking for
Spider-Man, Transformers, GI Joe, and whatever else was cool with kids
back then, I decided to look through the 
"comedy" section in a far corner. In reality that section was more like
the younger-reader zone, but I managed to find a Peter Porker comic,
which was a spoof of Spider Man and I thought it seemed amusing enough
to buy so I could annoy my Spider Man loving buddy. I also found an Ewok
comic (from Star Wars, but not the trilogy plot at all). Ewoks were
fresh in my mind because of the Jedi movie and a made-for-TV "Ewok
Adventures" movie.
	Both of those comics seemed promising enough, so I kept digging
through those comic boxes to see what else they might have. Sure enough
that is when it happened. One of the comics was a GROO comic with Sergio
Aragones prominently displayed by the title. I immediately recognized
the style of art because whenever I had daily summer camp, on the bus
trips my "cousin" and I would always love reading the MAD magazines he
would regularly buy. I was never so much into the comic strips in it,
except for Spy Vs. Spy and Sergio's "The Shadow Knows" and "MAD looks
at..." stuff. What I really loved to do first was flip through each
issue and inspect it for Sergio's marginals. That was the best part for
me.

	In any case, this GROO comic I saw looked more than promising
not only because it was Sergio's but because it was clearly a spoof on
Conan. At the time my friends and I were into dabbling with Dungeons &
Dragons. If anything, I think the artwork for that stuff was cooler than
actually playing the games. Of course we all knew about the Conan movies
and usually enjoyed just about anything related to fantasy, so to see an
apparent satire of the genre was terrific fun to me.
	Obviously I bought up that copy. They had a couple of others,
including the next number in the series, but I did not buy more than one
that first visit. I wanted to see how I liked it because I knew Sergio
was great with single scene images or single page series, but I was not
sure how good he would be in keeping my interest for a whole comic
storyline. Unfortunately, I can not remember the exact number that first
issue was, but I am quite certain it was one of the single digit issues
in the Marvel series.
	During that summer, even without my friends coming out to the
weekend house, I would go and buy up one or two issues from that comic
shop each visit to the house. It was a perfect way to spend the money I
earned for mowing the lawn each week. Back in New York City I knew were
there were comic shops within my area, so once school started up at the
end of summer naturally I was able to check them out to buy up whatever
issues I was missing. From that point on I would visit one of the comic
shops on the way home from School with my friends each Friday and I
would buy each month's new issue along with a baggie and back-board of
course!

	Related to all of this was the fact my dad was a very hard
working Portuguese immigrant, who worked two jobs all week long then
worked on the house on the weekend. I rarely saw him, and he knew
nothing of comics. When he was a kid by the time he was hitting puberty,
his parents had already sent him along with his several brothers and
several sisters out to work on their farm as well as to work on other
people's farms to bring in much needed money for the family. In those
days times were especially hard in Portugal, so he could barely relate
to my Americanized life even though his reason for immigrating was to
build a better life for himself and his future family.
	I bring this up because once he realized I was buying comics
with the money I got from mowing the lawn he was pretty upset. He
thought it was an incredible waste of money. Of course it did not help
at all that I really never wanted to go out to the house anymore after
that first summer. That was because I knew I had bought up all the older
issue the Long Beach comic shop had, so apart from the possibility of
earning a few extra bucks for mowing the lawn I could have cared less.
The more and more I did not want to go out to Long Beach the more
frustrated he seemed to be with me. He even threatened to burn all my
comics if he found out I was buying any more of them.
	Since my dad was hardly in my life because of his constant
working, which I of course appreciated much more when I got older, my
mom was much closer to me and could of course see how much I enjoyed the
Groo comics. She knew my dad was really only upset about my comic buying
because his primary interest in having me come out to Long Island was to
mow the lawn. Having me mow the lawn simply freed up my dad's time to
work on other projects around the house, so it was not like he wanted me
to come out for us all to spend quality time together. Therefore my mom
thought my dad was being too harsh about burning my comics, so once he
threatened me that is when she started given me a small allowance... for
lunch meals in the school cafeteria of course! Seriously, she did tell
me I HAD to buy something for lunch with the money, but she also told me
I could save up what ever change I had left over so I could buy my Groo
comics each month.
	Uhm... well... that is why I developed a habit to this day of
skipping lunch entirely. I barely ever spent money in the lunch room, so
I saved most of my money for comics and whatever else a kid wanted to
buy.
	By the way, the next summer my dad bought me a cooler nicer new
bike. It was a trendy BMX style bike, but it was still a cheaper
Toys-R-Us bike, and it was pretty obvious to me and my mom it was
another attempt to lure me out to mow the lawn. I played along for a
bit, but mainly to demonstrate an attachment to the bike. That enjoyment
of the bike was of course just a cover in order to convince my dad to
allow me to bring it back to New York City during the weekdays, but once
I had the bike in the city that change the whole ball game.
	From that point on I would tell my mom I was riding my bike to
Central Park with my friends, which we were only allowed to do together.
However, half of the time I would not even go to Central Park, but
instead I would bike to comic stores all around the city well out of my
neighborhood area to track down the issues of Groo I was missing and
some of the uncommon items like T-shirts and stuff. Once my search for
Groo had opened up the city to me by bike my world blew up.
	I even snuck all the way down to China Town and developed an
association with an illegal fire works dealer, which allowed me to buy
stuff at wholesale prices and make some money selling them to kids back
in my neighborhood. Roman candles, M-80s, and Pineapples (I think they
were double the explosive charge of an M-80 and considered a 1/4-stick
of dynamite) were the most popular, and luckily I never heard about
anyone I knew shooting out someone's eye or blowing off a finger, etc..
On the other hand though, some of the bad kids in the neighborhood would
use Pineapples to blow-up cracks into the plates on pay phones to score
quarters for arcade playing. However, I did not know that until much
later when the phone company started to install reinforced hinged and
locked plates across the standard locking plate, and a friend told me
why the phone company started doing that.
	I never got caught selling fireworks, but my incendiary-selling
days did not last much more than a year. After that I still biked all
over the city, and that eventually led up to my interest in becoming a
bike messenger and my life-long interest in cycling in general.
	...Thanks to Groo and Sergio!

	I hope this long Tone-length story was at least enjoyable enough
to hold your interest. Best wishes to everyone,
_TONE_