NoPants was my college zine. It featured pop culture satire, fake news, music reviews, and absurd collage packaged together as a ludicrous lo-fi magazine parody.

You can download a PDF of NoPants #0. And if you wanna know more about this issue of NoPants, here's how it came to be:

In the fall of 2002, I moved into a dilapidated house with six other people that I barely knew. I lived in a closet. Not metaphorically, but literally... my room was three feet wide and maybe five or six feet long.

I'd recently left my tight group of friends, quit my raunchy college rock band (Dirty Weekend), and my parents were on the verge of divorce.

I hated Carnegie Mellon University and I desperately needed new outlets to keep my mind off of everything else. That meant new music, new classes, new friends, and -- to a large degree -- even a new identity.

One of those outlets came in the form of a new zine series, NoPants.

I was no stranger to mixing lo-fi collage with goofy text and handing it out to people. The Lockeroom was my high school zine that basically got me into college.

Eager to reconnect with a defining moment of my high school years, NoPants exited my brain at top speed in October 2002. The content of this first issue was a natural extension of the humor I created years earlier for The Lockeroom.

My conscious goal was to create an art product that was relatively simple to reproduce. My subconscious goal was to rebel against principles of "good clean design" that I was constantly hearing about my first two years of college. That's probably why I handed out most of them to my friends studying graphic design.

Its reception was lukewarm at best. My roommates sort of ignored it and I barely got any feedback from my friends. While I would've loved a warm response, this didn't deter me. I was making it for myself.

I dig certain aspects of #0, but I think it was only a starting point. This issue doesn't have nearly as much pathos or poignancy as subsequent installments, which were packed full of more personal content and bigger ideas.

Next: Shit gets twisted in NoPants #1.

In April 2012, I responded to a call for writers interested in a picture book anthology called Apocalypse for Kiddies. The editor, Lyn Midnight, aimed to create a children's book starring heroes and villains who survived the apocalypse in unusual ways.

I was thrilled to be paired with artist Cat Neligan (a.k.a. Catillest). Together we created a little candy robot who saved the Earth with her caramel when gravity suddenly ceased to exist.

As I toiled away on distilling our parable into three short pages, the tale morphed into a rhyming poem. Then Cat cranked out three crazy cool drawings to go along with the poem and our submission was complete by June 2012!

Here's the final product -- Annabelle Made of Caramel:

However, Apocalypse for Kiddies never happened. I don't know why. I waited patiently, assuming the project would eventually gel. But it didn't.

And that's fine! It's totally normal for an anthology project like this to fall apart. But rather than let this fun little story sit unseen on my computer, I figured I should at least unearth it... FROM THE VAULTS!!!

Before I go into unnecessary detail about the creation of The Demon From My Butt, I'd like to share the final product with you. Just so you know, it was created to be animated and that's why the dialogue is underneath the panels as opposed to being inside word balloons.

The Demon From My Butt by Nick Marino (click here for more reading options if you don't see the embedded reader or your device can't run Flash)

Also, you can download The Demon From My Butt as a PDF.

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And now... THE BACKSTORY!

November 2012. It was the day before Thanksgiving when I was contacted by a development rep from Frederator Studios. They're the company behind Adventure Time, Fairly Odd Parents, and more.

I was invited to pitch ideas for Too Cool! Cartoons, part of Frederator's Cartoon Hangover partnership with YouTube. I thought I was super special.

"This is the email I've been waiting for," I said, "the one I knew I'd always receive!!! They're gonna pluck me from obscurity and turn me into a cartoon superstar!"

The truth is that Cartoon Hangover has an open pitching policy and I just didn't do enough digging around the web to find that out until later.

Blinded by ego and excitement, I threw myself into the pitching process. While I developed two soon-to-be-rejected ideas with a couple of collaborators, there was a third pitch that I developed alone -- The Demon From My Butt.

TDFMB tells the tale of a stoner named Eugene Cho. He gets the munchies one night and eats a crazy mix of food. This sends him running to the bathroom to take a massive crap... wherein a demon named Belaxis pops out of his ass.

It's inspired by my personal experience with IBS. I've struggled with digestion issues my entire life. Sometimes taking a poop feels like I'm giving birth, or -- if it's especially bad -- like I'm giving birth to a demon.

I was surprised to see that the pitches they sent me as examples (which eventually became Adventure Time by Pendleton Ward and Superf*ckers by James Kochalka) were extremely raw. My rep called them beatboard pitches, a term I'd never heard before because I don't have an animation background.

I decided that my TDFMB pitch should be equally as raw, if not rawer! Ya know, totally handmade and inconsistent. That's why when I sent them my final pitch in January 2013, it looked like this (I even left in the spine of my sketchbook to give it extra rugged appeal):

I also recorded a Fraiser-ish vocal demo for a TDFMB theme song.

Suffice to say that Frederator didn't like it. I got an email a few days later officially rejecting The Demon From My Butt:

While this is a really funny and silly idea, I'm not sure it's a good fit for Frederator. We're looking for character driven shorts with broad comedy appeal, and while Demon from My Butt has a lot of great jokes narratively it isn't the kind of comedy short we're looking for. Without a clear goal or a significant plot we're really left with just a series of more and more outrageous scenarios and ultimately this felt more like a single gag - the whacky montage between two unlikely pals - than a sustained short.

I can't argue with that! At its heart, TDFMB is just a wacky (hehe whacky) montage. What can I say? I love a good montage! Still, it woulda been sweet to see this become an animated short.

At some point in the future, I hope to share my other Cartoon Hangover beatboards with you. But those projects may yet have legs to stand on in the future. For now, this is the only one I can safely exhume... FROM THE VAULTS!!!

UPDATE: I've posted the original beatboards on my Tumblr. They're pretty much the same exact thing as the digital comic, only formatted differently.

UPDATE 2: I just learned that there's a new movie coming out soon and it's about a guy with stomach problems who discovers that he's got a little demon living in his intestines! It's called Bad Milo and it stars Ken Marino. WEIRD!!!