That Time I Tried To Build a Robot

When I was just a little six year old Ryan Fan Club, my family moved to a new neighborhood.  It was there, at #5 Coventry Cres., that I first started writing and drawing and creating various odd randomness.  But before I started drawing comics and wrestling magazines, I had a completely different creative ambition.

I was a cute kid.  What happened?

I actually tried to build a robot.

Two kids came knocking at the door to meet the coolest new kid in town (me!) and we quickly set out to work on our creation.

"What's your name," I asked the first boy at the door.
"Ryan," He said.  He lived down the street from me and had a friend visiting from out of town," which is how I knew he had been visiting from out of town.  "And this is my friend.  He's visiting from out of town. He's also named Ryan."
"No way," I shouted.  "My name's Ryan too!"
"Yes way!" Ryan from down the street shouted back in typical Wayne's World fashion, even though this was about four years before that SNL skit would become famous.
Then his quiet friend, who if you didn't know had been visiting from out of town, chimed in, "Do you want to build a robot with us?"

The backyard of my new house faced the backyards of the houses behind us, and there was this big space in between both areas.  Those houses were on a street called Rosemund Cres.  I was told when we were moving in that I wasn't allowed to go to Rosemund to play.  Apparently someone had been killed there earlier in the year and that street had garnered a bad reputation and my mom was a bit of a worry wart.

Now, between the two rows of backyards was just this empty space of grassy land.  It kinda dipped down a bit and was never mowed.  We didn't know if it was part of our backyard or not, but it was full of shit.  And I don't mean shit like dog poopie.  I mean random shit.  People who would move out of the Rosemund area would just leave stuff there that they didn't want to move, or when they were evicted their leftover stuff would be tossed into this junk area. 

me on the right, one of the Ryans on the left (not the one who was visiting from out of town that day)

Washing machines, random pipes, broken stereo equipment, tied-up garbage bags full of whatever, broken strollers, crutches, trashed shelving... you name it, it was probably somewhere in that trash pit scattered amongst the couple hundred emptied out Hostess potato chip bags.

1980s Hostess chips!

My new friends, The Ryans (one of whom was visiting from out of town that day) took me to this garbage heap to find the necessary parts for our robot.  Ryan, not entirely sure which one but definitely 80% sure it wasn't me, had brought some masking tape with him to put the robot together with.  We used a washing machine as the base of the body and then taped shit to it for an hour or so.

Eventually my mother saw us and told me to get out of the garbage heap.  I guess I was too close to Rosemund.  She then sent me to the Mac's Milk to buy her cigarettes with a hand written note giving me permission to get them for her.  Yes, this sort of thing actually happened in the 80s.  I've never smoked a day in my life, but I'll always remember 'Du Maurier Extra Mild 100s' because of the times my mother sent me to the store for them.  I was allowed to use her change for G.I. Joe comics, so that's okay.

But that's off topic.

A few days later, I went to Ryan's house (not the one who had been visiting from out of town for the day) to see about finishing our robot.

"What robot?" He asked me.
"The robot we were building with the washing machine," I replied.  "We never finished it.  We still need to try turning it on."
"Yeah," he said.  "Or we could just play with my Ghostbusters toys instead."

And that's what we did. 
You know, we never did find out if our robot would work or not.

- ryan

RFC Newzinetter #7

Here it is!
RFC Newzinetter #7!

Top 11 DC Movies I Wanna See

...last week the San Diego Comic-Con showed us two trailers for new DC Comics movies.  We lost our shit over the footage from Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and then we got even more excited about the trailer for Suicide Squad.

With Suicide Squad, it looks like Warner Bros. is finally putting some stock in DC Comics characters that aren't strictly Batman - even though the movie looks to primarily feature Harley Quinn and the Joker.  This gives me hope for some other DC flicks from some of their lesser known, yet awesome, stories.

As a life long DC fan, here are eleven I'd really like to see turn into popcorn flicks...

11. Guy Gardner and the JLI
10. Deathstroke the Terminator
09. The Legion of Substitute Heroes
08. Blue Devil
07. Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld
06. Batgirl of Burnside
05. Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (the full version with all the deleted footage)
04. Power Girl
03. Lobo
02. Ambush Bug
01. Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam

Birth Control

I have two wonderful children whom I love dearly.

But that's plenty, thank you.

Recently there were some weirdo protestors in my area flashing pictures of dead baby fetuses to make a point about abortion.  Gross shit.  And really, nobody wants to see it.  There are better ways of getting your point across.  Some people say abortion is wrong and others say it's the woman's choice.  While I do believe it is the woman's final choice to have an abortion, my complex opinion really doesn't matter because I'm not the one with a baby growing inside me.

So I got to thinking about birth control. 

Since having our second child in December of last year, my wife has been on birth control.  There were so many options to choose from.  Choosing the best birth control method must be like picking out new curtains.  Choose wisely, because you'll be stuck with them for a while, and you don't want to see them every morning and regret your choice.

this looks more like the Popomatic Trouble game.

There's pills, needles, patches, a lightning rod that goes up the vagina, or the option of just cutting my penis off. 

Yeah, I kinda like my penis where it is.

Whatever happened to the good old days when you could just tell a girl to jump up and down after sex and she wouldn't get pregnant?  Those were simpler times to be sure. 

Condoms are a great option, though not 100% effective, and after being married for half a decade wearing a condom again for the first time in years is like finding your favorite pair of ripped jeans hidden by your wife in a box in the basement.  Or your old, comfy Aerosmith tour shirt from when you were seventeen.  You worry about what it'll be like to put it on... will it still fit after all these years.... will it look awful with your more modern hairstyle... or maybe it's one of those cool retro things that has come back in style.  But maybe wearing condoms again is like seeing that favorite band today, twenty years later - they're older, a little out of breath, and still doing the same songs, tricks, and moves they were doing twenty years ago - and you end up just a little disappointed. Like you didn't get your full money's worth.  But let's be realistic, any Aerosmith concert is better than no concert at all.

Before somebody brings up the notion of abstinence as a means of birth control, let me just politely tell you to fuck off.  Let's see you eat three quarters of a bag of chips and not want to finish.

Anal sex is another option, but it's risky.  I'm not talking about the possibility of disease, but rather the probability of evolution.  Let's suppose every woman on the planet started insisting on anal sex, 100% of the time - eventually, over a span of a thousand years or so, the human body would evolve and change and we would start reproducing Bum-Babies instead of regular babies.  And no matter how cute and adorable that child might be, he or she will always smell just a little bit like a bumhole.


The whole problem of birth control could easily be solved if women would just encourage their men to put the almond explosion on their faces.  That would fix everything.  But for some strange reason they never consider it.

- ryan