Transposing childhood games onto adult pursuits is part of the starter-for-ten pack when it comes to cartooning, comedy, fandom, the arts, and my Lego obsession. Shut up, you’re not my Mum.

So here I am, doing it again.

Also, proof that editing exists: witness the insertion of ‘court marshall’ to make the joke more explicit, and witness the fact that I’d have to edit it again in the final draft because some dickheads can’t tell the difference between ‘marshall’ and ‘martial’. Past Lee: what a dildo.

“What do you mean, court marshall(sic)? I got their flag. We won.”

Or, as I’m now stuck teaching for the foreseeable future, perhaps it’s my adult nightmares. Either way, it’s the classic “turning up to school naked” dream made, uh, flesh, and let’s be honest, somebody better probably did it before me. Probably Bill Watterson. Yeah. Bet it was Watterson.

(Which is is good a time as any to remind you all that Thumbnail Thursday is a segment in which I upload old cartoons I sketched back in the days when I thought I might have a shot at being a cartoonist. We’re talking 25-odd years ago. Times change, tastes, change, and other people — actual actual cartoonists — have undoubtedly published the odd idea in the meantime off their own bat. Life happens.)

“It is not a dream, Mister Adams. It is also the third time this week.”

Some things are universal.

So, an explanation is required: that’s Lucifer in the middle, flanked by Hitler and Brutus. It’s Hell, and it’s the interview question from, quite literally, Hell. Because wocka wocka satire or something, and none of that is apparent from a thumbnail that is pretty damn crappy even by the low quality bar of my thumbnails to begin with.

“Tell me where you see yourself in five years.”

Yeah. It was a different age. And if I wasn’t stuck in the wilds of nowhere teaching teenage bags of uncontrollable sweat hormones, I’d hope things were different now, but yeah…

“All I want is to be a real bo… woah, momma!”

Another example of combining two obvious elements to try and create a third, a tactic I clearly resorted to regularly when I was trying to establish whether I could do this cartooning thing on an ongoing basis (Hint: I couldn’t).

Psychiatrist’s couch. Robot. Good job I didn;t go for anything really cliched, right?

“I just do whatever the voices in my head tell me to.”

Eh, so it’s an obvious one. They can’t all be winners. Or in the case of my abortive cartooning career, they can’t any be winners.

“We heard you’re going round calling yourself a Hell’s Angel…”

Alien abductions = funny. Hillbillies = funny. Put them together, and what have you got?

This. You have this.

“We’re a family, son. You abduct one of us, you abduct us all.”

Sometimes you come across something that must have seemed like a good idea inside your head when you had it. Possibly you were dehydrated.

I mean, the vampire’s filling up a car. With… blood? The car looks like a normal car. Is it a vampire, too? Does he not know how cars operate? Is there a lot of blood in those bowsers? How does this even all work?

Drink more, exercise daily, and stay in school, kids. Don’t have ideas like this, m’kay?

Charlie Chaplin was once asked how he could make someone slipping on a banana skin — already a worn-out cliche, even in those early cinematic days — funny. You couldn’t Chaplin opined: the way to do it was to set the slip up, then have your victim step over the skin and fall into an open manhole.

So yeah, this is that, except in Heaven. Ta-daaaaaaaaaaa! (Eh: they can’t all be winners).