The Birth of a Cartoonist

TheRealJellyman
3 min readMar 12, 2023

--

Inspiration can strike at any moment, in any place. It’s best to be prepared. Diversify your creative endeavors and reap the eternal rewards.

Background

When I was a younger child growing up in the suburbs of New York, there wasn’t much to do, but there was a lot of creative experiences to be had. Riding bikes to the neighbors house, splashing around in the creek, catching fireflies in the summer, the revelations were endless.

When I wasn’t outside wandering around aimlessly in pursuit of discovery, I was probably on the computer or reading. Different types of escapes. I became quite fond of comics from browsing the Sunday paper. Small simple stories succinctly told, delightful! Eventually I found my way into the adventures of Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson.

The fantastical adventures of a young kid and his stuffed tiger which came to life through the use of his imagination alone. To be young is to be alive and hopeful. An endless daydream.

Cartooning was an immediate interest to me as it brought a certain characterization of big political figures and whimsical air to everyday life combined with big imagination.

One day sitting in a middle school class break room, I doodled a small character into the margin of my marbled notebook. A classmate of mine at the time walked by and complimented the drawing. I thought I must be on to something! A character from my mind, onto the page, and the idea of bringing joy and entertainment to others. This was the beginning of the Jellyman journey. The year was 2006.

Jellyman

A small character made of jelly and a bit of imagination. A childhood delight. This small creature became a bit of a local sensation (at least it felt like that in my world).

The original Jellyman

At the time Dreamweaver was quite popular and I had a brother much older than me who was learning to become a programmer. He set me on the path of scrambling together HTML templates and my Jelly characters came to life on the internet.

It was exciting and fun to build out animations and storylines using the old Macromedia Flash format. The internet was a place of AskJeeves, MySpace, and AIM. It was the original Web1.0. In it I found a small corner of it and made it my own.

Custom items could be dropshipped using Cafepress and I had images to upload and share. Walking around the halls of an elementary school in my own custom swag attracted some attention. I started selling magnets with the Jelly characters on them. Printed a batch in bulk for 1$ a piece, sell them for 2$. My original hustle. These magnets ended up inside dozens of kids lockers and I was proud they thought it was cool enough to hang with pride.

As the days passed I made more and more unique Jelly characters each with there own personality. Some people even requested custom Jellys be made to reflect there own characteristics.

By the time Highschool arrived, the sentiment around esoteric social structures become more refined and restrictive. Jellyman was put to the side and talked about only on occasion when I bumped into a few of my old classmates.

Today I am happy to say the vision is revamped and reborn as the new diverse JellyLand in Web3.0!

Check it out at: https://jellyland.io

JellyLand Inhabitants

--

--

TheRealJellyman
TheRealJellyman

Written by TheRealJellyman

0 Followers

TheRealJellyman tells the story of creation about the Jellyman, Web3 technology, and a micro tech startup.

No responses yet