When you see me doing something stupid, I’m sure there’s some part of you that has to be at least a little impressed. Wow, I bet you think to yourself, that level of idiocy is really remarkable, and he seems so comfortable with being a moron. I bet he’s been at it a long time! And you know what? You’re right! I have been an idiot for a long time, which is why I manage to pull of impressively dumb things with the cool aplomb of a well-trained chimpanzee-astronaut. Today I’d like to share with you a particularly stupid automotive thing I did way back in 1989, a time when there was CompuServe but not the internet as we know it, and you could still legally buy Certs with Retsyn, before it became a controlled substance and destroyed so many lives. It was a wild time, and I was a product of my era, an 18-year-old dipshit full of hopes and terrible ideas. One summer day in that year when both Heathers and Crimes and Misdemeanors came out, I wrecked my 1971 Volkswagen Super Beetle by flying it 84 feet in a wreck.
I’ve written about my high-school car, the 1971 VW Super Beetle before, because that was the car that was so loud I had to turn it off when I picked up my girlfriend because her mom didn’t like Jews, especially ones like me, in loud cars and reeking of Retsyn. That car was my primary high school car, purchased from a friend’s sister for $600 because she never once put oil in it or even checked the oil or, I think, even opened the engine lid. So, I bought it with a seized engine, but, as luck would have it, I happened to have a re-built engine from my first car, a Wrigley’s gum/band-aid-colored 1968 VW Beetle that was wrecked when some dummy didn’t yield while turning at a light, smashing into the front of my Bug, hard.
The wreck wasn’t my fault, something surprising considering I was barely 16, but when my dad drove by and saw me there in the intersection, he still screamed JJAAAAASSSSOOOOONNNN like I was in big trouble.
Anyway, I had a perfectly good engine, even if it just has single intake ports. VW switched to dual intake ports in 1971, which, combined with those 1584 cubic centimeters of displacement, made the ’71 Beetle a screamer at 60 wild, ravenous horsepower. The rebuilt engine from my ’68 had only the single ports, which meant it only made 57 hp. That’s just a three horse difference, but I made up for that with my youthful vigor, no problem.
This was also a Super Beetle, in fact the first year of the Super Beetle, also known as the 1302. The Super Beetle differed from the standard Beetle mostly just in the front end; the Super had MacPherson strut front suspension instead of torsion bars, and that, combined with a widened and re-shaped hood, allowed for an 80% bigger front trunk! It was a big deal! The trunk was pretty damn big!
In 1973 VW updated the Super Beetle to the 1303, which featured a curved windshield and “real” dashboard as well, because VW thought they may have to cram airbags into these things.
This isn’t really important to the story, but it’s not bad to know, in case you’re ever confronted at knifepoint and asked to explain the difference in the two generations of Super Beetles. You’re welcome.
Anyway, that’s just introducing the car, which sort of is important. I really liked my silly little banana-cream-colored Beetle, and enjoyed driving it, often stupidly, which included things like putting it in first gear and letting it just idle and move slowly forward and then standing on the running board with the door open and steering from up there in an idiotic stunt I liked to call “Road Captain,” or just driving too damn fast and too damn recklessly.
I had one street in particular that I really liked to tear ass on; it was in Greensboro, NC, where I grew up, and it was called Green Valley Road. At the time, it was a long, winding road with lots of curves, a big center island, and golf courses on, I think, both sides. I liked it because you could really wring your car out and go hard into those turns, and it was just a lot of fun.
For whatever reason, I decided that nobody but nobody would beat me on that road, so if there were other cars on the road, I made sure I was faster. I mean, sure, 99% of them likely had no idea they were in a race with a shitty little yellow car with the same horsepower as the number on the Heinz bottle, but I knew, dammit, and that’s what mattered.
The road was curvy enough that I got to learn a bit about oversteer, because the Beetle, being rear-engined, was more than happy to do that. I learned what that tail-happy sensation felt like, but, significantly, I resisted actually learning what to do with an oversteering car, really. I just knew it was fun and made lots of exciting screeching sounds.
Anyway, one summer early evening, I was driving with my friends Charles and Jeremy, who were both well aware of The Way Of The Green Valley: if I’m on that road, I’m hauling ass. They knew this going in. This was how it was.
Still, this time “how it was” should have been a bit more flexible, as the road itself was not “how it was,” at least not normally. You see, Green Valley was in the process of being re-paved, and the surface of the road was scraped up, and was now covered in fine gravel, punctuated with the occasional metal lump of a water meter or manhole cover. It was a very different surface than the usual asphalt.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really appreciate the significance of this, because when I hit the road that dusk, I didn’t change my approach at all, which was a grave mistake. I launched myself onto the road with the usual madness, only this time the road had much, much less grip than normal. I’m not entirely sure when I realized this, viscerally; it was probably as soon as I hit the first turn, way too fast, and my back end started fishtailing around wildly.
As soon as I felt the back end break loose, I entered that strange state of focused panic that sometimes happens, where your concentration narrows to a tiny point and, even if you have no idea what to actually do, you’re really committed to doing it. I was sawing at the wheel trying to get control of the car back, and I’d have moments where I thought I was, but then lose it. Braking just made it worse, so we kept gaining speed. At one point I thought maybe if I put it in neutral and coast, I’ll have better luck, but when I grabbed the gearshift it broke off in my hand.
This could be because at the time my gearshift looked like this:
My friend Al had gone somewhere tropical and brought back this wooden tiki-like head, which I drilled a hole into and used for a gearshift knob. It was a little too big and heavy, and I think that may have been a factor in why the stick snapped off at the base. But, at the time, all I knew was that I was holding my un-tethered shifter in my hand and everything seemed to be going very, very wrong.
Then, I have a memory of seeing one of the front tires improbably going between two raised water meter things, snagging for one brief moment, which really made me lose control on the loose gravel. I then hit the median’s curb, popped onto the median, and hit a young, springy tree right where the front fender met the running board.
Something about how I hit that tree let the tree act like some kind of level or leaf spring or catapult, because at that moment I saw out the windshield the green of the grass and the deep blue of the sky exchanging places, rapidly. I think we flipped on both axes – at least that’s what witnesses told us afterwards.
That tree-assisted launch sent us flying – I remember looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing Jeremy, un-seat-belted in the back as was the style of the time, bouncing around like he was a ferret in a dryer. There was a moment of odd silence and then a deafening BOOM as we landed, thankfully, on the wheels.
From what I can gather, the whole event played out sort of like this:
I mean, this is a modern map and the path of the street may have changed and it’s not like I really remember the path, but this is generally what went down. The important part I want to note is that when the police came to do their police business, the measured where the skidmarks (the external, non-trouser variety) ended and where the tree was hit, and then where the car came to rest, and they said that distance was 84 feet.
I think I flew the car 84 feet.
The first flight of the Wright Brothers, which occurred in the same state, just out by the coast to take advantage of the favorable winds, was only 120 feet. I managed to fly my Beetle only 36 feet less, and I had two more passengers and a hell of a lot less time to plan! Where’s my plaque?
After we landed, we all took a moment to look at each other, make sure we were all okay, and then we exited the car, now perched on the grassy hilltop of the median. There was a crowd of plaid-panted golfers around us, as they’d seen the Beetle Cirque d’Soleil-ing through the air and they must have heard the boom of 1800 pounds of Teutonic engineering smacking into the ground.
They seemed surprised to see three uninjured teenaged dumbassess emerge from the car, and for some of them, maybe just a little disappointed. I was in shock, but thrilled no one was hurt. I remember walking around my car, which really didn’t look too badly damaged, but that was deceptive. The impact was hard. In fact, one deeply strange detail I remember was that there were blades of grass trapped between the tire and steel wheels, presumably because when the car hit ground, the tires must have deflected enough to come off the rims, and then when they rebounded back, pulled out grass that had been in the ephemeral gap between tire and wheel.
I mean, I think. I can’t figure out how else that would have happened?
I got very, very lucky. I mean, yes, I lost my beloved car (I kept the engine, though, and very soon put that in the 1973 Beetle I still have today) but I was fine, and my two friends were fine. Had that gone any differently I have no idea how I’d have dealt with that. But, thankfully, it didn’t. The tree hit the Beetle at a particularly strong point where the floorpan spreads out to full width, and I think that’s why the body remained so intact; we landed on the wheels instead of the roof, so all of the suspension parts could do their job to absorb some of that impact, and, perhaps most thankfully, there were no other cars around me that could have become part of this ridiculous disaster.
For years after the wreck we talked about the 84-foot Flight of the Beetle, marveling at how lucky we were, feeling perhaps a bit invulnerable, thanks to the wonderful delusions of youth. Now I look back on it and see not invulnerability, but the haphazard hand of chance, swinging around wildly, and, somehow, at that moment, we managed to avoid getting slapped too hard. I don’t know if there’s any actual reason, but I do know I’m wildly thankful that’s how chance played her hand that day.
This remains – and I hope will remain – the biggest wreck of my life. And I, along with two friends who I still know and love to this day, all walked away, for the most part without a scratch (actually, I think Jer had a big scratch on his back, probably from the rear ashtray or something). By modern automotive standards, that old Beetle was about as safe as a modern Volvo, but only if you’re currently getting stabbed in that modern Volvo, over and over again. It was, charitably, a deathtrap. Almost everything on the road was a deathtrap. And yet, somehow, when I needed it to hold together, it did.
I don’t think there’s a way to completely avoid driving like an idiot when you’re a 17 year-old dummy. But, it’s probably worth trying, because the sort of luck I managed to get is not something you can count on.
Also, I still claim to be the Undefeated Champion of Green Valley Road. So there.
I took a minivan at a too fast speed down a two way street going downhill that had a train track halfway down it. I don’t know how long we flew but it felt like forever. We landed with a thud, some screeching, and a bit of crossing the double yellow line. The suspension was never the same after that. Haha. From reading these comments it turns out I’m in the right place with other people doing similarly idiotic things.
Imagine, if you will, the level of idiocy that will result when you take a bunch of late-teen and early-twenties males, place them in pickup trucks they don’t own, and send them careening around the suburbs of Buffalo, NY delivering auto parts to every mom-and-pop garage and dealer service department in town. Sometimes in the snow.
That’s the situation I was in in the late ’90s as a college student with a part-time job at a regional auto parts chain. I did get some air in a ’92 Ford Ranger that I jumped on some railroad tracks, I don’t know how far I flew but I know I floated completely off the seat.
I also thoughtfully provided one family with their Christmas tree by knocking down the pine tree in their front yard with a longbed Chevy S-10 during a snowstorm.
Ha I delivered auto parts in Bozeman, MT after high school in ’02 and the stupid shit I got into with those 2wd pickups in the snow and ice, some of it intentional, some of it not. But yeah all the younger drivers brutalized those trucks I’m shocked they lasted as well as they did. I got at least two call in complaints about my driving lol
While ripping along the narrow roads and parkways around the Yorktown battlefields one summer afternoon in the mid-80s in my 1971 Volvo 144S 4 speed, I came up to a little bridge that pops up from the main road, as rural bridges sometimes do…
…the little Volvo and I flew over the other end – and when we landed, I very suddenly had not throttle control at all.
When I stopped and popped the hood, I found that the throttle lever – which usually pivots from a stem that fits within a rubber grommet in the firewall had been grinding against the bare metal hole for some quite time, creating a little hourglass-appearing groove in the lever which finally snapped in that little airborne stunt.
I found some tools and a hose clamp in the car and jerry-rigged a temporary pivot for the lever to get me home and to the Volvo dealer where I purchased a replacement pivot and grommet.
In retrospect – it’s probably better that I had the lever snap out on a road like this where I was safely able to pull over and do some handiwork in relative peace and safety rather than on a city street, a freeway or in the Hampton Roads Tunnel.
At least you didn’t ruin your tail lights. For that, you can turn to Taillight Ruiners.
Is it time for Sushi?
Another classic Torch line.
I took a motorcycle airborne over a railroad crossing once with no ill effects, but there was that other time…
I was riding in Daytona Beach at night along the south side of the airport, well ahead of my riding partner, both of us on small 250cc bikes. The road curved to the left and a car coming the other way washed out my view through the visor with their headlights. When my vision cleared I has lost the curve and was heading for a utility pole. I slowed and intended to just take the outside onto the grass, but was not aware of the 10′ deep drainage canal behind it. I hit bottom and my thoughts cleared just in time to see and hear my buddy ride by, oblivious that I was laying in the much at the bottom of the ditch. He tootled on down the road and I started trying to wrestle my bike out of the mud. Eventually, someone with a truck and a rope noticed my lights beaming out of the hole and stopped to help me. Once we got it out it was still driveable, but had a good collection of vegetation wrapped around the rear axle.
We named it Swamp Thang after that, and calculated an approximate 1:1 glide ratio.
Similar experience in my mom’s 1996-ish Subaru Outback. Twisty, undulating mountain road that I’d discovered I could take at 65-70 (posted limit at 45 with turns recommended slower) but only if I used both lanes for certain turns. Springtime means the road had continued to disintegrate itself into extra bits of gravel all winter, which had piled up in new and interesting places. Combine that with the rare occurrence of an oncoming vehicle at just the wrong moment, cue Blur’s Song 2, and I performed (what I still think was) a brilliant-looking but entirely accidental 360 spin, somehow managing to miss the other vehicle, trees & steep hill up the oncoming side, and trees & steep embankment falling away from my side. Came to rest pointed in the correct direction in the correct lane, AWD/ABS warning lights blaring on the dash. Restarted & continued home sheepishly. Sorry Mom.
Example number 2,456,912 on why women live longer than men,
The best airborne vehicle story I have doesn’t have nearly the distance of Torch’s, but if you calculate it by the number of feet by people who flew in the vehicle, I can beat him.
Twas the 80’s, and I was in junior high band. We departed Bonham Junior High for Permian High for competition. There were three busses loaded with kids. I was in the lead bus.
The driver missed a turn, and the two trailing busses followed him. Upon realizing this, the lead driver made a hard right turn, jumped the curb, and drove across a vacant field AT SPEED (about 30-35mph) to get back on the correct street.
The two trailing busses followed. AT SPEED.
Halfway across the field, we hit an invisible ditch. And as I said, AT SPEED. In a fully loaded school bus.
The front end LAUNCHED into the air. I don’t know how far off the ground we got or how far we travelled, but we hit HARD. I know I flew at least a foot out of my seat.
Then the back axel hit the ditch, and we all flew again. Somehow, the bus driver remained in his seat and just. Kept. Going. After all, we had a schedule to meet.
After talking to other band kids, the two trailing busses did exactly the same thing with exactly the same results. It was a miracle no instruments or students were destroyed.
So, if the busses flew no more than, say 3 feet per axel, that’s 6 feet over 3 busses. 18 feet total. If there were 40 kids per bus plus driver and a band director, that’s 124 people times 18 feet, we have 2232 total people feet flown, versus only 252 total people feet flown by Torch and his Beetle!
Tortured logic FTW!!!
“people feet”! How can relate that to man hours and horse power?
And the irony is he never broke the speed limit.
Ever seen an Audi fly outside of a rally stage? I had a ’93 100 CS Quattro. One morning, I was heading home from a party.
Now, everyone knows rough railroad tracks smooth out if you cross them fast enough. I knew a set was coming up that were rough. I buried the skinny pedal and wound the car to extra-legal speeds.
Now, my hung-over brain forgot an important feature of these specific tracks. They were slightly raised from the road level.
So, with the ground speed indicator registering 3 digits of freedom, I hit what is essentially a low pitched ramp.
I flew, roughly 2-3 feet off the ground, maybe more, for about 200 feet before 4000lbs of German engineering returned all 4 tires to Terra Firma in a flat landing.
I’m pretty sure that is what did in the wheel bearing (and my spine).
I flew a car once. Nearly died too. There was a really weird railroad underpass in my town where they clearly decided after the rails were installed that they wanted to take the road that previously dead ended on both ends, underneath the tracks. This was on a relatively steep hill, but they still had to dig out a lot to go under, so if you were going down it, it was similarly shaped to a ski jump. I took my mom’s car out one night just driving around with my girlfriend, and decided to go for it. The run up was decently long so we hit the jump doing like 60.
The second the rear wheels took flight, a car down the road blew threw the stop sign and pulled out in front of me. Believe it or not, brakes do not do a lot to slow you down when you are airborne. After what felt like 10 minutes, we slammed down, all 4 tires freaking out because I had locked the brakes in the air, I let off the brakes, regained traction well enough to swerve around the other car, skidded onto the sidestreet that was right there and threw the car in park. It was bad. Not the only time I nearly died with that particular GF in the car. She was a bad influence. I am sure it’s all her fault haha.
You win the 17 year old dumb ass driving competition, Torch.
My 17 year old dumb ass competitive event resulted in the phrase: The Diiiiiiiittttttccccchhhhhh seared into my skull in slow motion by the kid in the back seat of my (Dad’s) Simca 1204 nearly a half century ago. The fully loaded with youths Simca had just performed a perfect pirouette next to a crick on a deserted country road, no thanks to my driving; completing the competition unscathed by the way.
…Which resulted in my favorite saying, “God protects drunks or little children but not both.” We weren’t the former, but certainly were the latter.
Also, “It’s better to be lucky than good,” comes to mind, though I prefer to be both.
I’ve only flown a car twice.
The first time was a jump over a humpback bridge in my stripped out S12 Silvia at 30mph. It wasn’t in the air for long, but it landed on all four wheels at the same time and I felt like a hero.
I felt like such a hero that I did it again the next time I drove over it. Except that time I was in my mk2 MR2, which has quite a lot of rear weight bias. I landed heavily nose first, felt lucky not to have broken anything (me or the car) and haven’t got air in a car since.
As an S12 owner this hurts me.
It was a £700 car with significant structural rust and a welded diff, not a good one. I’d used it to take my drift licence test in.
I gave it away after it failed it’s MOT inspection (rust, bent suspension, more rust), and the new owner fixed it all up and re-installed the interior, so it has a happy ending.
How blessed and lucky in life I am keeps me Catholic but keeping Torch alive and ruling the world tempts me to convert to Judaism.
What’s the prevailing religion in Florida? That god is busy.
“Wow, Dad! We must have jumped 84 feet!”
“That’s nothing to be proud of Russ. 84 feet!“
[Torch] was speeding. [Torch] was driving like a maniac. We can all be grateful to this [tree] for stopping [him].
I didn’t know there was a Wallyworld in N.C.!
You’ve wrecked 2 beetles and are somehow still on the first engine you started with?
It’s that damn engine that’s causing all these crashes. And when the engine couldn’t take out the driver via crashing, it went and tried to explode the driver’s own engine!
Clearly!
I was! Well, up until my Beetle was stolen years ago; when I recovered it, the engine was gone. So somewhere in East LA I’d like to think that engine is in its at least fourth Beetle.
You probably don’t want to know what it’s doing, but at least it might still be going… or they stripped it to sell the parts. 😛
OK let me summarize here.
Car 1 = wrecked, donates engine X
Car 2 = starts out fine, dead engine, accepts engine X
Car 2 = wrecked, donates engine X
Car 3 = accepts engine X
Car 3 = stolen, relinquishes engine X
Car 3 = recovered, accepts engine Y
Is that correct?
Love it Torch. Dudes especially do crazy stuff like this – for better or worse.
I wrecked my 1st CTSV in a similar situation. Glad we were ok.
I feel bad for destroying a rare car but the motor/trans went to a happy place.
You got me beat, though we have some similar stories. I was passing someone on a two lane that merged into one in my ’84 Subaru GL wagon and, since that took some road, I ran out before the merge. OK, I was nosed ahead, except that at the end of the merge, the pavement just dropped off into dirt and a deep, long puddle of water with no way to avoid it. Lifting is for pussies! The not altogether serious about his job “guardian angel” screamed in my head, keeping the throttle pinned and holding the wheel straight, I figure I’m about to make a big splash and then slow down on the dirt, hopefully before hitting a chainlink fence, but if I did, eh, impact bumpers. Anyway, the puddle hid a pit and next thing I see is way too much dirt surface through the windshield before landing front wheels first, then rebounding again—I think it caught air again—and then a third time when I know I just unloaded the suspension. Let it settle before turning the wheel and I completed the pass with about 10 feet to spare. Went back to measure what I think my air distance was and I came up with about 50 feet.
My GF lived on a hill in a quiet neighborhood and I’d park on the street near her window so I could sneak out way after I was supposed to be gone. Push it until the incline took over, hopped in, and started it fifty yards away.
I got the grass in the tires once, too, but that was my ’83 GL sedan. Hit sand dumped at the blind apex to a high speed entrance ramp going about 80. Back end out, I counter and pin it, POW! with the right rear off the guardrail, spinning me the other way. Counter and get the car oriented in the proper direction holding the throttle down in the hope of regaining more forward momentum than sideways as I slide on the grass median between the onramp and the interstate parallel and heading toward the latter. Look out to see the curbing along the breakdown lane, turn into it to hopefully avoid a flip or blown off tires and bounce perfectly onto the pavement. Downshift and on my way figuring the car is smoked, but I need to get the f out of there, feeling for anything off with the car, though it felt normal. Turned out to only be a scuff mark on the paint and a small dent I easily kicked out from inside the trunk, plus the grass between the wheel rims and the tires, which made me laugh.
You had the grass in the rims too!?
A mate of mine did it too, also when 17, as he tried to drive down the steep hill out of my village, forgetting the 90 degree turn at the bottom. His mum’s Micra understeered straight off the road, and somehow ended up with the front end propped up on a lump of concrete, with the front wheels off the ground. Because he’d had the wheels hard over, they’d hit the grass verge side on, and the grass was all stuck in round the rim. Only at the bottom of the wheel because he’d also been hard on the brakes.
Fortunately, I was just behind him, and between both cars we had about 8 teenaged boys, so we easily lifted the Micra back onto the road. Apart from some gouges in the sump, and the grass in the tyres, it was fine, so after pulling out the grass he was able to take it home, with his parents none the wiser.
How me and all my mates made it to our twenties, without dying in a wreck of our own making is a mystery.
Can confirm, sliding sideways at high speed in a grassy median is an effective way to end up with grass pinched between rim & tire. Works in an ’83 Wagoneer as well as as smaller cars, apparently.
lose the final “as”, you ass
I had the very rare 8-spoke factory alloys on the sedan, so the wheels probably weren’t that bad, but the tires were something like 185/70-13s, so there was plenty of flex.
“that level of idiocy is really remarkable, and he seems so comfortable with being a moron. I bet he’s been at it a long time! And you know what? You’re right!”
I get the feeling it started much earlier, as with myself. Got the reputation in the neighborhood that I could fly further than anyone else off our poorly constructed plywood ramps, and was the first to test any new/improved design. Jumped 7 kids with 3 speed Schwinn stingray w/banana seat. I said you guys don’t want to do that! What if I land short? They said we’ve measured your jumps, you’ll clear us no problem. Cleared em with a spare kid width. It’s amazing we survive at all with such Adrenalin madness.
The frontal lobes, where executive functions ( reasoning, judgement, impulse control) are located is sometimes not “fully” developed until 25. Not sure mine are “fully”.
There’s a reason that car rental companies won’t rent to persons younger than 25.
Wow your engine has survived two wrecks and three Beatles. How many miles does it have?
We talking air miles or ground miles?
Dipshit Qualifying Miles.
Egad. Good that you all survived intact!!
Funny, for years I had a recurring dream (along the lines of those archetypical dreams where you find yourself having to take a final in a class you didn’t know you were taking and having like one day to cram for the final) where I would be driving my old Volvo 144 and having the shift stick break off. I always chalked that up as just being the stuff of nightmares but, dang, you had that actually happen to you IRL!! Now I’m gonna have to double-check (& triple-check) the shift stick in my 1969 VW baywindow bus before I get it back on the road.
FWIW, when I bought my 1985 VW Jetta Mk2 diesel sedan many years ago my kid and I did some research on the crash safety of various VWs and found that the Super Beetle (1303) actually did better in crash safety testing than the Mk1 Golf and Jetta and that the Mk2 Golf and Jetta actually compared favorably to the contemporary Volvo 240. So guess I’ll stick with either the Mk2, despite the Mk1 having the much more iconic looks, or the Super Beetle.
The story itself was great, but what really made it for me was the drawings. Esp. that tiki shifter.
I was kinda hoping, by the end, for a drawing of Torch and friends sitting on the ground with little stars & moons circling their heads while stern cops scribbled in notebooks or something…
I was somehow getting full camp batman. KAPOW!!! OOF!!!
I agree. Torch, I seem to remember you wife is a graphic artist? Did she do them?
She is a wonderful designer but I do these. I was a designer, too! Still am!
Wow. Really adds to the story. I had a median event on time. I was driving my 72 Delta 88 convert. Thanks to it’s enormous size and weight I was able to regain control and able to put it back on I-95
I’m imagining a 70’s TV style freeze frame as the Beetle’s wheels leave the ground, and a voiceover of: “At this point, Torch realised he done fucked up”
Yeah, the artwork was first-rate. And the drawing of the tiki shifter made me actually LOL.
Agree. The drawings are the best part. More of this pls.
Wow, a full twisting front somersault with a stuck landing. That would’ve been worth at least a 9.5 in those days. Not so much since Simone Biles came along, but then she doesn’t have to perform with two friends on her back.
How is it that this is the first time we’re hearing about this? Geez, Torch, you’ve been holding out on us… although I’m glad you said it here instead of the ‘other place’.
*The Grey Age*