Friday, May 19, 2006

Old School Flavor...Prayer Warriors style

From the Triangle archives, March 30, 2001

I ran across this old edition of the Prayer Warriors recently while packing some things for the move. For those who are not of the old-school Bryan College mentality, the Prayer Warriors was a pseudo-comic strip made by myself and my friends Mike Roukas and Christa Neeley Mullins when we ran the Triangle. It dealt with some actually serious issues most of the time but with a really weird silly slant. Somewhere around roughly 10 percent of the school understood what we were trying to say with the comic (actually a series of photos taken using old action figures and then bubbling in captions through the program Paint), and the rest just looked forward to the next edition of the Prayer Warriors so they could replace the paper in the bottoms of their birdcages.

If you click on the photos it will open them in a new, larger window. You should be able to click on another icon in the right corner of that new window to enlarge the photos enough to read the captions. It's still pretty fun stuff in my opinion, mostly because most of the stories originated with early-morning sleep deprivation, and then we had the guts or lack of common sense to print it for everyone to read. No wonder people looked at me like I had birds flying out of my ears for most of my senior year...

The Prayer Warriors was a really good experience for me. It taught me that you could have fun with a serious topic and sometimes get your point across in a different way that made a bigger impact. It also taught me self-confidence, because there were often repercussions from what was printed that I had to stand by.

I had big plans for the David, Gabriel and Princess Jael, but somewhere after graduation those plans were lost. I guess bills and jobs got in the way. I think it must have been ahead of its time anyway, sort of like Marty McFly wailing away on the electric guitar in the 1950s scene from Back to the Future. So maybe the Prayer Warriors will be ready for the public sometime in the near future. I'll at least try to post a few other classics sometime and take whatever criticism that gets dished out.

This particular issue, title "Appearances vs. Reality" and featuring Alf, was created as a response to those haters that questioned whether we were of sound mind and capable of running the paper.

© Matt Williams, Mike Roukas and Christa Neeley