But I'm getting ahead of myself, 'cause there was more to the creation of PB&G than a bunch of really cool-looking superhero toys. By the time I hit fourth grade I had been reading Marvel and DC comics for several years, and I was ready to start making my own. Apart from youthful enthusiasm and a pointed sense of humor, my hand-drawn comics didn't have much going for them. My older brother was a much better artist than I was, and for a long time I drew all my characters with Snoopy-shaped heads, because the human head was too detailed for me. Though my pencilling skills never really blossomed, the ways I presented my work grew and improved. I made neat little stapled booklets out of notebook paper, with elaborately copied logos and special effects rendered in colored marker. Out of dozens of little comics I made, the first recurring character was an original concept: "Roberta Hunt, aka Fart Girl."

           

    The effect on my comics-making was about the same, though. Without a ready audience of readers, I didn't have much enthusiasm to keep making books. I'm sure I also realized that my skills as a writer-artist had probably peaked, at least in the medium available to me. So Fart Girl, that gassy avenger of the wronged ceased to have adventures, but I didn't stop making comics right away. I turned my attention to characters and teams from DC and Marvel comics, and started making books that integrated my own original characters with various Defenders, Avengers, etc. Most of the books I made were unfinished, but I have (I think) a surprising number of complete issues. The longest-lived was a title called "Tribble Quarterly," which made it to eight and a half issues. It starred a talking fuzzball with little arms, tiny shoes, and awesome cosmic powers. Apart from being simple enough for me to draw, he also hobnobbed with characters from Kirby's Fourth World, like Darkseid and the New Gods. Not coincidentally, I was reading the revived New Gods title at the time, so Tribble's adventures crib terribly from that book, and Mister Miracle as well.

    Eventually my obvious artistic limitations got to be a drag, and I went back to reading comics instead of making my own. But another of my literary inspirations was just around the corner, in the form of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings. First I would see the Bakshi film, which for all it's flaws is still an amazing movie in my opinion. It inspired me to read the books for the first of many times, and this in turn got me hooked on fantasy literature from authors like Roger Zelazny, Diane Duane, Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony. I dabbled in sci-fi lit, but for the most part I was reading 'sword & sorcery' books, of which Tolkien was paramount. Smeagol, aka Gollum was a character who appealed to me from the first. A gangly, big-eyed creature who sat in the dark and talked to himself. Though I was never gangly or big-eyed, I know I sympathized with him far more than saintly Frodo Baggins.

    I continued to read comics and fantasy lit into adulthood, but it was only in the last decade that I got the urge to make my own comics again. My writing had improved considerably since "Fart Girl," but my hand-rendered art hadn't, so I had to cast about for ideas. As I mentioned above, the bar came about in part because I didn't have a place to put all my action figures. When I spent some time thinking about what I could house them in, I got to thinking of environments, like the dioramas used in fumetti strips like ToyFare's "Twisted" Theater. By that time in my life I had spent quite a few years working in bars, so it wasn't a huge stretch of the imagination for me to choose a tavern for my figures to roost. The first Paradise Bar was just a collection of items used to make a diorama on a shelf, with no walls. It consisted of a plastic bar set that had a canopy, a few felt-covered stools, and a tiny space for a bartender to stand. Since it was just barely DCD scale, I used it to make the first few PB&G strips, which were simple photos of my action figures with photoshopped word balloons. The early stuff looks pretty crude in comparison to what I do now, but it was a stage of development I needed to go through. I was pleased with the first strips, but wanted a set that was more elaborate and durable, and that's when I decided to build the main (two floor) set of Paradise Bar. If you go to the "Beginnings" section of the site, you can see how the current bar set came together, step by step.

           

    With over five years experience now on PB&G, there are still challenges left for me in crafting new comics. One that I've been working at is the integration of original characters, who are usually custom figures. The most noticeable of these is a character I've dubbed "Wonder Smeagol," the illogical pairing of Tolkien's squishy anti-hero and Marston's truth-telling heroine. The Amazing Amazonian Precious is a toy "mash-up" who attempts to bridge the factions of my literary interest, while remaining (somewhat) familiar to other readers. Ideally, Paradise Bar would be the place where you would meet such unlikely characters, and that sense of unpredictability and whimsy is what I strive to maintain with new stories. Like my 30+ year old "Fart Girl" comics, I want to share my inane humor and comics-making style with my peers...and the Web has helped me to accomplish this on a scale I wouldn't have dreamed of, back in '75.

    So WELCOME to Paradise Bar, this comic fan's imaginary stage for ongoing adventures in the DC-Q. Here you'll see heroes and villains, cartoon characters and real-life personalities... all "off-duty," and sometimes off-continuity. They might not behave the way you'd expect them to, as the inhabitants of the DC-Q are not predictable, in spite of obvious similarities to their comic counterparts. The "Beginnings" section includes photos and descriptions of the bar building and its components, from start to finish. The "Tour" is a short story strip that debuts the bar's finished interior in various views. The "Premise" section explains the fundamentals of the Q-niverse and Paradise Bar's in-house continuity. The "Comics & Stories" section includes all PB&G issues, and "PEEBEEGEE" is a weekly strip that expands on the original bar tour. Next is The "Desktop Wallpaper" section, which includes some nifty 1024x768 resolution images (taken from various photo shoots here) that you might like to use as PC background. The "Glossary" is a short collection of terms and phrases that are peculiar to comics, DC, and/or PB&G. The "Legal" section spells out some important copyright information, and also offers some 'thank you's' to those who have made this project possible.

       

JCollins, 4/8/07