Rick Parker, sketching at his home studio in Falmouth. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

Rick Parker has spent a lot of time drawing comic books written by other people, telling their stories with his art. But with the release last fall of his graphic novel memoir  “Drafted,” he finally got to tell his own.

Parker, 78, began his comics career at Marvel in 1977 and is probably best known for drawing the “Beavis and Butt-Head” comics in the 1990s. In “Drafted,” he details his three years in the Army during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. His images show the shock and fear he felt being thrust into a completely different world, where death was a real possibility.  But the text and drawings are also infused with humor and wonder.

Parker’s 250-page graphic novel has been lauded by critics and landed him on some best books lists for 2024. In listing the top 10 graphic novels of of the year for Forbes magazine, Rob Salkowitz called the book “a work of remarkable depth, personality and experience, punctuated by Parker’s lively cartooning. A real revelation from an overlooked talent.” Writing for the website Comics Beat, Ricardo Serrano called it “an ode to comic book storytelling” with satirical takes on the military and honest, insightful observations.

Most important to Parker is that he got to use his art to do exactly what he wanted.

“I’m like that guy who’s a good guitarist, but always playing somebody else’s song. When you finally realize you can play and write your own songs, it’s incredible,” said Parker. “Now I’m doing what I wish I’d been doing all along.”

And he has no plans of stopping. He’s begun working on another graphic novel memoir, about the 25 years he spent creating art in New York City. The Savannah, Georgia native lived there in his 20s to study art and begin a career as a fine artist, and eventually got into the comics business.

SERIOUS ABOUT THE FUNNY PAGES

“Drafted” includes text and images from Parker’s childhood, and his time reading books and comic strips with his bedridden grandmother. It then jumps ahead to his time being drafted into the Army at age 19, in 1966. The first drawing he did for the book depicts rows of bleak gray and black Army barracks at night, with snow falling. He writes of his early days in an Army camp: “As I plodded along, amid all the joyless inductees, I kept reminding myself that I was just in the Army, not in some prison or concentration camp.”

The first drawing Rick Parker did for “Drafted,” of an Army camp. Image courtesy of Rick Parker

Parker considers himself extremely lucky that he never saw combat and was never deployed to Vietnam. He spent much of his time working on the Army’s nuclear missile program on U.S. bases. The book follows him as he leaves home and is inducted. There are funny images of a Marine drill sergeant shouting at a long-haired hippie, and of young men of all shapes and sizes in their underwear, getting their physicals. The book’s art and text describes how Parker tried to use his art skills to fit in by drawing portraits of other soldiers’ girlfriends, and how he faced the idea he could be shipped off to war at some point.

The pages of the book also show Parker encountering things he hadn’t before. Having grown up in the segregated South, he was now bunking with Black soldiers. Though he wasn’t in combat, he saw soldiers die in accidents. There are several scenes in the book that show Parker getting combat training at night. He was so tense and on edge during one training session, he ended up shooting a sergeant in the face, with blank ammunition.

A page from “Drafted” by Rick Parker of Falmouth. Image courtesy of Rick Parker

Parker is probably best-known for drawing the “Beavis and Butt-Head” comics for Marvel, based on the teenage slackers of the popular animated MTV series. But he’s also well-known to comic book aficionados for his prolific career doing hand-lettering for many Marvel comic book titles, said Rick Lowell, co-owner of Casablanca Comics in Portland and Windham.

Hand-lettering adds to the look and feel of a comic, and some fans have their favorite letterers, Lowell said. Today, some hand-lettering is still done, but much of the text in comic books is automated, Lowell said. He said what Parker did with lettering is “sort of a lost art.” Parker says he probably did the lettering for some 1,200 comic books, totalling about 30,000 pages.

Besides lettering and drawing “Beavis and Butt-Head,” Parker has also created art for a wide range of comic books and graphic novels. He did the art for a series of parodies of popular novels and films, including “Harry Potty and the Deathly Boring,” based on the Harry Potter series.

“I’m just really pleased for him, that he’s getting the recognition he deserves,” said Lowell, who has been selling comic books for 38 years. “He’s been a prolific artist and he’s a very gifted writer. The book has a personal touch and I think the subject is timeless, a young person trying to find his way.”

A page from “Drafted” by Rick Parker of Falmouth.

NOT A SUPERHERO GUY 

Parker moved to Maine from northern New Jersey about 12 years ago with his wife, author Lisa Trusiani, who wrote “Barbie” comics and who grew up in Maine.

“Drafted” begins with images of Parker as a boy growing up in Savannah, where his mother ran a laundry and his father worked for the railroad. He spent much of his time with his grandmother, who was paralyzed but who read to him constantly. Parker writes that he loved reading the comics pages in the newspapers most of all, and he thought some of those characters — Little Orphan Annie, Nancy, Major Hoople — must be modeled after friends and family, because they bore such strong resemblances. Parker shows the characters on his pages.

Parker remembers that drawing came easy to him, and by the age of 7, after family and teachers recognized his talents, he considered himself an artist. He thought his art skills would help him fit in with other kids and teens. His peers did come to his house to see his artwork, like it was a museum or gallery, but not really to see him, he says.

He applied to Dartmouth and Pratt Institute, a New York art school, but was rejected by both. So he went to a junior college in Savannah, which had no art program. He flunked out and was therefore eligible for the draft. He was 19 when he went in the Army and 22 when he came out.

He understood pretty quickly that the experience of being in the military at that time, with Americans dying in Vietnam, was worth telling. He just wasn’t sure how.

“The stuff happening was so unbelievable I knew I was going to have to tell somebody someday, even though I didn’t think of myself as a writer,” said Parker.

Falmouth artist Rick Parker used his experience in the Army during the Vietnam War for his graphic novel “Drafted.” Image courtesy of Rick Parker

After working various jobs after the Army, Parker did get into Pratt, and got his master’s degree.  He hoped to become a fine artist, and pursued that career in New York City for several years, but found making a living was difficult. He heard about a job lettering at Marvel, in 1977, and took it. Even while he worked on mainstream comics for the next 20 years or so, lettering and drawing, he was more a fan of underground comics, with their personal or cutting-edge stories.

“I didn’t get the whole superhero thing, I just didn’t understand it. I though they were silly, for kids,” said Parker.

The idea of writing and drawing something about his own life was in the back of Parker’s mind for a while. Around 2014 he began writing about his life, including some of the same stories that show up in his book, and putting them in his blog. Around 2017 he started working on “Drafted” in earnest.

Parker says he’s happy at the positive reaction the book has gotten. He figured there would be people his age interested in it, people who were drafted or simply lived through that era and had similar experiences.

He didn’t know if it would appeal to a broader audience, and really didn’t care.

“I don’t really do my work because I’m trying to figure out what people want. I needed to do this for my own personal reasons,” said Parker. “I felt this was an experience that I went through, and I had a viewpoint that few others had. “