1993-1994
In 1993 I came up with a superhero team, named Extreme, based on the
X-Men toys and miscellaneous action figures I had at the time. I played
out various stories I came up with. My first original character was
created at this time. The character was named Electron and I used a
silver Batman action figure (
photo)
which I then spray painted silver to portray him. Over the years with
the toys, in comics I later made, and just in my mind Electron's story
& powers became highly developed.
I
continued to watch superhero cartoons and soon began buying comics and
reading them, falling in love with the medium.
1995On September 26, 1995 I started working on my first
real comic, titled Cats. The story was about numerous super powered
cats with powers similar to the Fantastic Four and the arch villain was
Peaches based off of my brother's sometimes annoying Chihuahua of the
same name which we kept while he was away working. Cats was separated
into one page parts with a total of 13 pages in that first series.
1996 I
went on to do a second series of Cats.. I began the stapled comic series, Blood
Battles, based on a Lobo comic book I obtained. The first issue
borrowed heavily from that issue of Lobo with it's weapons, enemies,
and use of blood. The series also borrowed heavily from other places.
The first two issues were independent stories where a group of guys go
into a battle zone dying off until only one remained to fight the boss
of the zone. Then later issues tied the champions together in battle.
Blood Battles was my primary comics focus in 1996-1997 and ended around
May 1998 after being a monthly series for a few months. Blood battles
was usually 7-9 pages long, stapled, and with a cover. Blood Battles
tied into a the M Comics 1 Shot series which ran in a monthly parallel
in late 1997 the peak of my comics output.
With the first issue of Blood Battles my comics came under the label M
Comics. The M officially stood for nothing but was also said to have
stood for Michael Comics or Mutilation Comics. Around this time I also
founded the pseudo company Michael Inc. (with my then 'trademark'
eyeball i dot).
1997Cats in 1997 involved
a full color remake of series 1 & 2 with extra panels. I also
worked on an 18 page Fantastic Four Cats Spectacular giving great
back-story to the Cats universe and bridging the story from a lost 1996
issue into Cats Series 3 which gave way to Cats being a 1 full page a
day series (Daily Series). The Cats daily series legitimately ran from
11/10/97-10/28/98. There was also a one page a week, Weekly Series,
spin-off Stretch The Lost Years and a weekly series unrelated Ninja
comic titled Yule both beginning in Dec 1997.
At the end of 1997 I renamed my comics label Wiscers
Comics in honor of Cats. I put out a M Comics credits book profiling
all the characters from Blood Battles and 1 Shot in a similar fashion
to that of the profiles at the end of Marvel vs. DC.
1998In 1998 I tried to start a new comics series based
super powered beings from a planet called Wenot being in various groups
and warring against each other. I created dozens of profiles for new
characters similar again in Marvel vs. DC fashion. When I failed at
creating the Wenot Wars series I attempted to take the Blood Battles
series to Wenot but ultimately didn't finish that either.
In February 1998 I began my obsession with pie which
led to me writing comedy primarily for the first time. First I wrote
the Pledge of Pieleigence then I began working on two Pie Comics. These
comics were my first major humor projects and had the first songs I
ever wrote which were parodies of Gospel hymns & popular songs. I
foolishly set out to make 3 issues of Pie Comics a week, a feat far too
great to accomplish. For the remainder of seventh grade in class I
joked around with my friends and wrote various pie related things which
were thrown away.
As other projects fell by
the way side (Blood Battles, Pie Comics, Wenot Wars) I continued the
Cats Daily Series (often written many pages a day and far ahead of
time) into a new series (I called an issue a series). The new series
was Easter Egg (Cats Series 5) and it lasted and epic 68 pages. It had
many battle scenes with egg and rabbit enemies and outer space
sequences similar to Star Wars with the Easter Bunny's warship being
called the Death Egg Star (also borrowing from Sonic the Hedgehog). The
Easter Egg II series (Cats series 7) came about later that year ending
the story with Easter Egg 100 & 101 which was a two issue, full
length, Cats 3rd Anniversary Spectacular spanning 58 pages total in
September 1998.
On October 8, 1998 I wrote a paper where I
parodied America and used the name Piemerica instead. This eventually
led to the adoption of Piemerica (fully known as
Piemerica-Incorperated-Eternally Oct. 28, 1998-Oct. 27, 2007) as the
name I housed my creative works within. In eighth grade I continued to
parody America with Piemerica and joked with my friends on paper and in
speech about Piemerica warring with England.
1999 Sometime in eight
grade I began imagining stories of various imaginary bands. I would
make fake albums with tracklistings and artwork. On April 30, 1999 I
decided to actually start writing lyrics for the song titles and albums
I thought up. I ditched some of the immature albums concepts and went
to write songs for three imaginary bands (New, Tripple Seven, &
MARS). I continued to come up with fake albums including tracklistings
and artwork and wrote songs for them, totaling 187 songs written in
1999 taking up the vast majority of my creative time especially in
November & December.
On September 5, 1999 I gave my life
to Jesus Christ and became a born again Christian. In January 2000 God
began dealing with me about the content of the lyrics I wrote. At this
point I was still profanity in my songs. I began writing the song F.C.4
which tried to capture the rage, sadness and depression of my
pre-salvation writing. God set me straight not to write in such ways
anymore and it mostly filtered out with the final songs using any
profanity being around May 2000. When I put my massive lyric catalog
online in 2004 I heavily edited my songs from the 1999 era to remove
profanity at least and also the pointlessly overt violent and sexual
content.
I began collecting my original quotes and some
favorite quotes into the first Enornal Fornitude which took place from
August to December. I came up with other zany comedy ideas in 1999
several songs comics and lists. I came up with a fake television show
& movie that I talked to people about which soon took on the name
Boo! Bub? Boo. Bluh?. I wrote parts of a script for the movie and went
talking about the movie and the show all around school until the end of
1999. At the end of 1999 I began a comic adaptation of the movie which
I added to in mid 2000.
2000 The first half
of 2000 Boo! Bub? Boo. Bluh?
comics & lyrics based on imaginary bands were my primary creative
work. The second half of 2000 I took on the name (The Joe) and
a creative golden age occurred in Piemerica. With Laslo PanafleX
as my creative comrade we wrote and performed speeches about our
inventions of book drinking, skillet hats, and disease jelly. We also
refined the Piemerica comedy style of innovative outrageous senseless
in-your-face stream-of-consciousness comedy that pulls many a
switcherooes. The avatar of this style was perhaps my writing of the
song Equal Non-Equal Neutral meant to be the longest most pointlessly
confusingly random song of all time. As a branch off from Equal
Non-Equal Neutral I started writing (The Joe)'s Autobiography, a
third-person comedy autobiography spanning several millenniums. I have
worked on it on & off through the years. Several other new comedy
songs
came about in the era, some of which PanafleX and I performed as a
commercial before our Disease Jelly commercial. We invented many dances
and had much fun with strange, random ideas. Tae Kwon Dumb was also
thought up in this era.
2001Not long into 2001 PanafleX had moved
away and I was creatively left alone. 2001 was a fruitful year as I
began writing informative comedic one-liners I dubbed lessons. Lessons,
Top 3s, and Book Drinking Tips were a large part of my creative output
in the first half of 2001 and I spread them about school telling them
to people every time I had them. Lessons still persists to this day. In
late 2001 I began a comic series called The darkened Reality of
Real-Estate. I consider it my pinnacle in comic making with its
intelligent, dramatic, & poetic humor. My last couple of years of
high school had me writing journals for English class based on topics
given. Unwilling to be either normal or unlazy I made wrote these with
as much funderfulness as I could muster.
2002
In January I started a Piemerica e-mail list which I used to send
out creative material. It also used marketing/advertisement humor. I
founded the Piemerica website February 1, 2002. From then on it became
the housing and primary outlet for my creativity. The earliest
exclusive content for the website was My Nonexistent Pieto Album. In
April 2002 I started my tradition of ligit Lesson Mania Week. In this
week I write and give multiple lessons for each weekday. Aside from the
Piemerica Anniversaries it is the biggest event of the year in
Piemerica.
With }the Joemeister{ I created Piemerica's first video game, the
comedy RPG (The Joe)'s Piemerican Book Drinkathon. It was followed up
by the epic comedy RPG (The Joe)'s First Book Drinking Fantasy. The
dialog was fun to write and I got to use some game based animation and
level design for comedic/artistic effect. These games provided a
springboard into me making music as some of my first songs were made
for Book Drinking Fantasy.
In the fall, with my good friend Joenan, I recorded and released (in
the yards, sidewalks, classes, and halls of my high school) my first
album, Piemerican Disc, featuring experimental & comedy music later
dubbed Rock 'n' rigamaRoll. I also created the official Piemerica logo
which would later appear on the album cover.
December 13th I released Piemerican Magazine #1. It was a long worked
on project made alongside issue 2. I consider it one of my greatest
accomplisments, especially at the time, because one person creating an
entire magazine is quite unique. Many people have done the things I've
done but this one is a rare feat especially considering the
non-derivative content set in the land of Piemerica.
2003 After 143 consecutive
Lessons I moved onto having daily updates for my Piemerica site. I
wrote original content for "Daily Update" at the beginning. It included
short stories cut into pieces each day, fake news stories set in the
land of Piemerica, an advice column, holiday/event posts, & much
more. Piemerican Magazine #2 came out April 23, 2003.
In May I started making music videos for songs from Piemerican Disc. I
made them a couple of days before I graduated High School as I had
hoped to because video was the last artform I hadn't created in. In
August I made Scrib, a 60+ minute midi song released on CD later that
year. In September I had two more video games come out. One being the
very brief and silly Pie Fun. The other being Greedy Ghost, a game with
original float and collect high-score based gameplay.
November saw my first releases by MARS (Michael Aaron Reyes Songs) my
solo experimental/electronic/instrumental music. I released a lot more
music in December also along with a 3D animated music video for the
song Cingle Sircle.
2004
I made a tremendous amount of music this year, over 20 hours
& over 300 songs. I didn't have a job during the full year so it
was all Piemerica. I redesigned my
I'm Tired. Sleep Tonight. RADIOHEAD site and based all of my music sites off of it with the
MARS Web Site coming out the next day. I've been paid professionally using that layout as a basis.