In Appreciation Of Dennis Worden’s STICKBOY #1

A Really Great Comic Book From The 1980s

I was a full-on comic collector nerd as a kid and in my early teenage years, but by the time I graduated high school superhero comics were just not very important to me any longer. At one point, at the age of 19, with no job and no money to pursue my newer passions of drinking beer and buying punk records, I made the decision to sell off my comic book collection. I didn’t get rid of my entire stockpile, though. Among the couple dozen books I held onto then (I still have most of those books today) is Dennis Worden’s STICKBOY #1, published in 1988 by Fantagraphics Books.

Eight issues of STICKBOY were published between 1988 and 2005, chronicling the hilarious misadventures of a sarcastic, philosophically tortured stick figure. Stickboy suffers through the bullshit and indignities of everyday life while keeping his mind on the ‘big picture’ questions — “what is our purpose in life?” and “does god exist, and if so why is he such an asshole?” When I first read STICKBOY #1 I felt like Worden could have been writing directly from my own thoughts and feelings and experiences. Reading it again now before writing this, I found that it still holds up.

In STICKBOY #1 our protagonist does the following:

• Gets fired from a job and suffers through the indignities of a job hunt and job interviews.

• Contemplates suicide while stressing out about his high rent and low wages and trying to find some kind of meaning in his life.

• Gets a job at “Pizza Pete’s” and soon proceeds to dump a pizza over the head of his teenage boss.

• Quits that job and embarks on a vagabond lifestyle at a local park, where he gets in an argument with his own dick, ruminates on the nature of god, and eventually quits his own comic.

• Joins a cult and gets hypnotized by a guru.

• Runs away with a cute girl, only to die in a nuclear war.

• Ends the story by being reborn nine months later (sorry for the spoiler, but come on, this comic was released 36 years ago).

Phwew!! It’s quite an adventure!

Worden’s writing in STICKBOY is highly sarcastic and very very funny. He has a great tendency of ending a segment of the story, or the entire story itself, with a punchline of a last panel that seems to come out of nowhere and is usually at Stickboy’s expense (which is something I have found very influential in my own comic-making). STICKBOY is also a very relatable comic. When his boss at the pizza joint badgers him about showing some pride in his work and Stickboy dumps the pizza over the guy’s head…..well, I fantasized about doing something similar many times during my years working at Little Caesar’s Pizza. I never joined a cult, but I have slept in parks, lived in shithole apartments, and have probably had more than one argument with my own dick. There’s so much in here that I find relatable in terms of thoughts I’ve had and experiences I’ve lived. It’s pretty great when a silly comic book about an angry stick figure can evoke an emotional response that stays with a reader decades later.

I mentioned earlier that I felt STICKBOY #1 holds up 30 plus years after I first read it. One thing for me that noticeably held up when reading this again is Worden’s art. STICKBOY isn’t a title known for the masterful drawing of a Crumb or Clowes, but there are great things in this book. For most of it Worden employs a basic 9 panel grid format with the use of dashes and dots to convey things such as an evening sky or a grungy apartment. Simplified figures and effective panel composition allow for the expression of movement and time passage, and plenty of dialog, without the art being overwhelmed and cluttered with words. It’s a simplified drawing style that may come off to some as crude, but I find it works perfectly for the story being told.

Among the alternative and underground cartoonists who made a name for themselves in the 1980s, Worden is probably one of the least known of the bunch. I think this is a shame and that he is very underrated, but I suppose this is due in large measure to the fact that he wasn’t as prolific a cartoonist as some of the bigger names of the era. Nevertheless I remain a big fan of Worden’s stuff and STICKBOY #1 is among the comic books I would take with me to the proverbial desert island. And, I’m happy to say, I’ve had the opportunity to chat with Worden a little bit on facebook, and he’s a pretty cool guy, too.

Aric Calfee 11/29/24