Tequila Worms: Bustin' Cabezas Since 1995...

above: the Tequila Worms are out to bust a few cabezas (art by Some Fat Guy Whose Name I Can't Recall).

This afternoon, as I shuffled through a stack of old papers that had sunk to the bottom of my desk drawer, I came across the last surviving page of a comic book I worked on a looooong time ago...

Way back in 1995 the High School version of me could most certainly be called one of the (ahem) Cool Kids. In fact, the coolness that began rooting itself within me back then has only grown and grown until now my coolness cannot possibly be measured. What started it all?

Why...my membership in the Comic Book Club, of course.

In High School, what can be cooler?

Except I wasn't really a member. Aaaaaand it wasn't even an official club. A few of us (ahem) Cool Kids would get together in the library to read and talk about comics. Eventually, we started writing and drawing them, too. Each 'member' (I think there were four of us, or maybe five) of the 'club' wrote a comic script and Some Fat Guy Whose Name I Can't Recall, the best artist of the group, decided which one he thought was best and drew it. My script caught on: The Tequila Worms.

The Tequila Worms were borne out of my love for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mexican Action Films (no one should be so cool, I know). It was a Great Idea, everyone (three out of four of the Comic Book Club members) agreed, and Some Fat Guy Whose Name I Can't Recall and I started putting together the comic book that was sure to catapult us into comics super-stardom.

I'm still waiting for that, yeah.

Years passed, and all of that. For some reason The Tequila Worms and members of their team - El Bigote and Tener Fojos (check 'em out in panel 3) and the Ape with Toilet Paper Roll Hands - have always stuck with me. A few months ago, when I sat down to write a script for an upcoming Pulp Comic anthology I found my thoughts drifting back to them. I tried to write a 'grown up' version of the Worms, but everything that spilled onto the computer monitor was derivative of TMNT - old habits die hard. However, the supporting characters came to my rescue...

El Bigote, updated as an undead Mexican Bandito, became the star, and Tener Fojos one of the baddies. Lots of the weird creatures that inhabited the Tequila Worms' alternate Mexico showed up as well: Tequila Goblins, Tekilla Worms and more. Artist El Chivo has posted a sample of the new El Bigote strip on his blog here.