Barf Bag Hand Puppets, Part 1

Originally published August 7, 1992, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #977

And now, a column that has no particular value to it whatsoever, except perhaps to indicate that I have entirely too much time on my hands (which, considering my present workload, is laughable).

Many people go around with sketch books and collect sketches from artists.

Not me. That’s too simple. That’s too mundane.

I collect barf bag hand puppets.

Legend has it that Simon and Garfunkel wrote “Feelin’ Groovy” while stuck in traffic on the 59th Street Bridge in New York. Well, I can personally attest that boredom leads to strange things.

Stay with me on this…

Some years back, myself and a number of other Marvel employees were on our way to a convention. Or at least, we were endeavoring to be on our way. But our plane, once having pulled out onto the tarmac, then sat there due to airport congestion or mechanical failure or just plain sadism. Just to make things further stimulating, they even shut down the air conditioning to save power. (And just think—if we’d all died from discomfort or frustration, they could have saved all those great airline meals, too.)

As hour literally mounted on hour, we were losing our collective minds. Finally, I became so starved for entertainment—having read the in-flight magazine and even the little emergency procedure card—that I pulled out the barf bag from the seat pocket in front of me, stuck it on my hand (not a good thing to do all the time, since it’s lined with disinfectant) and started talking to it. The barf bag then began conversing with a child nearby, who thought it was neat.

Archie Goodwin, sitting nearby, took out his barf bag and drew a face—one of his Archie faces, if I remember correctly. And several other artists on the plane followed suit. Soon there we were, a bunch of grown-ups, talking in funny voices with barf bags on our hands.

Eventually the plane took off (or I think I’d be there to this day). But by that point I’d hit upon a plan. Towards the end of the flight, I scarfed up as many spare barf bags as I could get my hands on. (I figured that I should wait until the plane was coming in. I didn’t want some poor devil to get air sick, reach for his barf bag, and discover that it’s five rows back with the idiot from the comic book company).

At the convention, I gave them out to other artists and said, “Here. Use your imagination. Make a hand puppet out of it. Anything you want.”

The neat thing about it is that, naturally, the bottom (or top, depending upon which way you’re holding it) of the bag folds over, which means that you can do stuff to the flap and have an additional gag apparent once the puppet is put into use.

I did this at several conventions, and over the course of it got some terrific designs as a number of artists rose to the challenge. Particularly memorable was Dave Sims’ Mick Jaggeresque character from Cerebus, whose tongue would hang down when you lifted the flap. And it was Dave Gibbons, I believe, who did a dynamite Frankenstein portrait, which looked relatively normal until you raised the flap and then his brains were popping out the top of his head.

Great stuff.

I even thought I had come up with something so completely original that no one else could possibly be demented enough to think of it. At that first convention, I went up to Bob “Flaming Carrot” Burden and said, “Guess what I collect, Bob! Barf Bag hand puppets!” Whereupon, without a word, Bob produced several Barf Bag hand puppets from his briefcase and calmly informed me he’d been doing it for some time already.

It was a lot of fun and people who weren’t appalled by the idea really got into it.

And then the whole collection got swiped.

I was carrying them in a portfolio case, and was in the process of getting a rental car. I put the case down to fill out the form. Didn’t take my eye off it for more than a few seconds. And when I turned back, it was gone.

I was so bummed out about losing the whole shebang that I stopped collecting them altogether.  That was several years ago.  But now I’ve started thinking about them again, and decided that it’s time to start getting back into it… particularly since, now, I have this column, which it seems (for reasons that utterly elude me) a lot of professionals read. Which means that I don’t have to explain over and over again just what it is I’m doing.

I figure it’s only just. Apparently BID has occasionally caused people to spew. So using it to help me with my newly re-started barf bag collection seems fitting somehow.

The place I chose to relaunch it was the Chicago Comic Con. I didn’t bother asking the Image guys to contribute since I figured that (a) I’m persona non grata and (b) they’d probably just think that I was trying to make fun of them (“What, you want me to draw on this so that you can have something to heave into when you read my comic? Forget it, wise guy.”) But I did approach some other folks and got some great results.

I’m running three of them in the column, and will occasionally thrill readers with others. The three shown here are by R.C. Harvey, Gordon Purcell, and Randy Zimmerman, all of whom made excellent use of the fold-up flap feature (and Randy was even ambitious enough to use the back as well, in a send-up of the old Hulk sweatshirt).

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll hurl.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, has his panel schedule from the San Diego Comic Con.  He’ll be doing readings at 3 PM Friday [to try something different, he’ll be reading his plots from upcoming titles such as Spider-Man 2099 and Aquaman], be on a panel the following hour about the future of Star Trek, and a panel on Sunday afternoon about writing in a shared universe. He hopes to see you all there.)