“People have been so busy relating to how I look, it’s a miracle I didn’t become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm.” – Robert Redford
I’m not entirely sure about when the very first time I drew Prometheus the Protoplasm was, but the first proper cartoon I signed and dated was on March 11, 1986. Somehow, that’s 40 years ago today, and I’m still telling his stories in Amoeba Adventures well into the 21st century. Weird, eh?
I’m kind of big on anniversaries, maybe because they feel like a concrete way to mark the inexorable, annoyingly quick passage of time.
The first very silly Prometheus the Protoplasm cartoon was a weird parody stew of anti-communism propaganda that was heavily influenced by newspaper strips like Bloom County, Doonesbury and Dan O’Neill’s Odd Bodkins in its attempts by a pimple-plagued 14-year-old to appear edgy. I drew it in a science class – and many of the earliest Prometheus comics were done like that, in the margins of classes I should’ve been paying attention to.
But comics were my school, too, and so I drew things like the first few very rough Prometheus comic strips and full comic stories (published for the first and only time in the digital Amoeba Adventures Archive back in 2020 if you’re keen to look it up), scribbled mildly PG-13 comics in notes to my friends, experimenting by jamming on weird diversions like a Prometheus-meets-Snoopy comic, Prometheus meeting the Beatles and a never-finished horror tale called “A Protoplasm on Elm Street.”
Eventually, though, an actual character and stories started to take shape with this oddball Prometheus – who basically, with his fluid shape and bobbing eyeballs, was the only thing I could easily draw at the time. Prometheus became a bit of an alter-ego for me, insecure, lacking confidence, but hoping he could be better. Other characters started to pop up, too, all fragments of who I wanted to be – swaggering Rambunny, brainy Spif, hilarious Ninja Ant and wise Karate Kactus.
From late 1986 to 1989 I whacked out six issues of a Prometheus comic that nobody other than me and a couple other people ever really read, a rambling narrative that began with unbearably primitive art and ended with slightly less primitive art that ripped off a lot from the Marvel and DC comics of the mid-1980s. But I kept wanting to do more, to do “real comic books” somehow with my limited talents.
Prometheus became more than a diversion between classes when I entered college and I started drawing a new comic called Amoeba Adventures, putting out the first issue around November 1990. I was a freshman in Mississippi on the other side of the country from my friends and used my comic as a kind of pen-pal bait to fervently keep in touch with the past.
I soon discovered the great bustling small press fanzine scene of the 1990s and somehow, people actually wanted to read my weird comics. Amoeba Adventures and Prometheus became something far more than just a series of doodles – sure, small fish indeed in the wider comics world, but to me, it was a revelation to actually have fans and readers following Prometheus as his world gradually became more and more complex.
The great artist Max Ink joined me for a dozen or so issues of Amoeba Adventures and made it all look better than I could ever imagine. Twenty-seven issues of Amoeba Adventures and another dozen or so spin-offs and side tales all came out by 1998. Prometheus comics won acclaim and awards on the small press scene, “big” comic creators like the legendary Will Eisner, Dave Sim and Sergio Aragones read them and offered a little uplifting praise, and it was a remarkable time.
The rest is painfully ordinary, probably – by 1998, burned out and getting busier in the so-called “real world” with my journalism day job, leaving my twenties behind and starting a family and all that jazz, I put my pens down and Prometheus went dormant for more than 20 years, until the gaping void and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic made me pick it all up again in 2020, republishing all the old stuff online, putting out a couple of actual real-life book collections over on Amazon and putting out 11 issues now of “new” Prometheus adventures.
A part of me is still that 14-year-old kid, scratching away on his notebook paper when he probably should’ve been paying attention to other things. I still marvel, sometimes, that all the great experiences I’ve had because of Prometheus – friends I’ve made, stories I’ve gotten to tell – stemmed from those first comics, 40 years ago now.
It was strangely easy, it turned out, to return to Prometheus as a middle-aged dude. The same uncertain, hopeful amoeba I drew all those years ago was there, like me, a bit more battered and slightly wiser from everything that happens in a lifetime. I’ve loved drawing a more “mature” Prometheus and his cast of friends, his unlikely love affair with the human superhero Dawn and his changing voice in a changing world. My art skills will never be magnificent but at least I’m better able to capture the stories in my head than 14-year-old me once did.
In recent years it feels like I’m finally finishing the story I began as a gawky teen, all those years ago. I sure appreciate everyone who’s ever read one of my silly Prometheus comics, and had a few words to say about them. You never know when a doodle might change the course of your life, a little bit.
Nik Dirga 