The Origin of the Beginning

So people occasionally refer to the English Teacher X icon thing as a "snowman" but in fact the original idea of it was to be sort of a blank slate, a featureless being.

I used to doodle these little scary faces with X-eyes and mouths sealed shut and blobby bodies with elongated limbs all the time, on bar napkins and on pieces of scrap papers at school, but the origin of the English Teacher X "icon" was in about early 2002. I'd begun my climb to being King of Vodkaberg and was hanging out with one teacher and a few of my female students at a gay bar, though in fact it was full of bisexuals and girls trying to get away from their boyfriends or husbands.

Anyway, there were three girls I was hooking up with at that time, all very different -- one was kind of rich and snobby, another was a head-banging rocker chick bisexual, the other was a sort of nice university student type. We were talking about how it might be possible that they would all like me, and I suggested that it was because my generic American good-looks and position as a teacher of English made me kind of a blank slate, a tabula rasa upon which they could imprint their own idea of the International Dream Man.

I'd been travelling for most of the 90's, and far from becoming the fulfilled, broad-minded person that legend tells us travel creates, I found that I felt like a ghost -- seen and heard occasionally, but completely lacking in substance and permanence.

I doodled the first snowman picture on a bar napkin and scribbled "English Teacher X" under it, and liked it so much I went home and drew a bunch of cartoons which the Exile didn't want so I dumped onto the Internet. . . this was mostly before blogs, so I made my own crude and primitive website. Wow, remember websites? Too quaint.

I decided that if I was a ghost, I was going to build my own haunted house.

Most of the original website poured out of me in great violent vomitous red-and-black spurts of unedited typing and hastily-cut together cartoons, between 2003 and 2005.

(In the end I think perhaps Vodkaberg itself became my haunted house. . .)

It still lingers in cached pages on the internet, but the site itself hasn't been updated or changed in years. A lot of it is badly outdated now.

So I'm going to start recycling chunks of it and sticking it up here, starting with the cartoons. (You can't see any of the illustrations on the cached pages, it seems.) You can see the most recent versions of the site on these links.

These are the first English Teacher X cartoons. . . a tachyon transmission from the year 2002. Click on them to make them a decent size.