I have a very vivid memory of the time I was in the first grade and I colored in a phonics worksheet with a big dark green crayon that was from the Whitman company. When I got it back, my answers were correct but my teacher, Mrs. Hickman, had written “Messy! You can do better!” That night, ashamed, i sat at the top of the stairs crying until my parents noticed and came to comfort me.

I suppose I should go on a long rant about Mrs. Hickman and how things like this are scarring to young children and how she destroyed any chance I had toward learning and because of her I never liked school, but I’m not. The truth is, she was one of my favorite teachers and I have great memories of her class. But what I can say is that my tendency toward messiness coupled with being a high-achieving student is probably the reason I’m such an anxious mess all the time (and may be some undiagnosed ADHD, but I’m no expert and I have no idea if that’s true). And I never could color outside the lines. When I think of the coloring books I had as a kid, I think of how so many pages were just scribbled all over. I also think of the ways I’d try to “correct” things when I was older, coloring around the mistakes and filling things in to make them look like they weren’t drawn by a manic toddler.

Coloring was, of course, always fun, and possibly the easiest way to spend your time as a kid. And yet like all things, as you got older you realized that there was a little more to it than simply sitting down with a book and a box of crayons. Or maybe that’s me, who seems to find some sort of logistical calculus in just about everything in life. But I think even the least fussy among us would agree that it was better to have the 64 pack of Crayola crayons (with the built-in sharpener, of course), because it was truly the best and to this day is probably the most iconic box of crayons in existence. Crayola has a pretty wide variety of packaging, from eight packs of fat crayons to skinny crayons in packs of 8, 16, 24, 48, and 64. I think at one point or another, I had a box of each and that’s not because I was a spoiled Richie Rich, but because much like other kids in generations, I accumulated crayons. They were favorite presents from grandparents and aunts, you got them in party favor bags, and I think my parents bought them for me every once in a while just to keep me occupied. After all, they were easy to get and they were cheap. I even had the neon crayons that the company put out in the mid-Eighties. 

But the 64 pack with the sharpener was the one we all wanted and is also iconic. It meant that you could do so much. Granted, I think I was most excited to color the sky sky blue and that my favorite color–blue-green–was included. But I’ll also say that having 64 colors was not only a treat, it was an education. No, I never wound up using the name burnt sienna in any context other than that crayon box and I’m still a terrible artist, but my vocabulary was almost immediately expanded and I saw so much broader of a color spectrum. At five or six, that’s huge, even if my time with those 64 packs only lasted so long until the crayons dulled or broke, the labels peeled, the sharpener jammed, or the box fell apart and the crayons all wound up in a plastic bin where you sometimes took your chance finding the right color. That’s also a time-honored tradition because we still have a box of random crayons in the house, culled from many packs of Brett’s crayons (though Brett has since moved on to nice colored pencils).

By the way, Crayola has manufactured packs of crayons beyond the 64 pack. A Google search shows a 96 pack, and they have put collector’s tins and anniversary tins out over the years. My wife has one from 1991, which has 72 crayons–64 plus eight that had been retired. I think I’d heard of it more maybe even seen it at my friends’ or my sister’s friends’ houses, and hers is nearly untouched. It doesn’t go for a ton these days–maybe about $20–but it’s still a cool artifact.

But crayons weren’t our only methods of coloring and by the time I got further into elementary school, the cool thing to draw and color with were magic markers. Of course, Crayola had a variety of magic markers available and those were just as ubiquitous as the crayons in our annual art supplies. A number of years ago, they even put out a “Marker Factory” where you could custom make your own markers. Brett had this and it was pretty fun to use even though it often made a mess. But the magic of Crayola’s markers was nothing compared to the sheer ecstasy that was Mr. Sketch.

Manufactured by Sanford back in the day (now made by Newell Brands), Mr. Sketch is a brand of markers that are thick, chisel tipped and scented like various fruits that correspond to their colors. Red is cherry, orange is … well, orange, purple is grape, black is licorice, yellow is lemon, and so on. These only seemed to exist in school when we were kids. Our classroom teachers and art teachers would bust them out every once in a while and then have to deal with all of us sniffy the markers and getting various color marks on our noses and upper lips. The colors were high quality–bold and bright–and we had them in classes until the eighth grade (or at least that’s when I last saw them because I stopped taking art classes in junior high). Years later, I’d find them in a closet at the school where I was teaching and brought them home for Brett, but the smell was so strong that the markers gave all of us headaches. I guess they were best left in the past, capped and put away after I grew out of them.

Okay, that’s a like. You never truly grow out of Mr. Sketch. But at some point, the colors that he provides prove limiting and you want to expand your horizons when markering. Plus, the high from Mr. Sketch only lasts so long and by junior high you’re sniffy Expo markers and Wite Out as the latest way of chasing the dragon from smelling all of those ditto pages in elementary school. Plus, the Mr. Sketch markers were too thick for detail.

Enter Pentel, who manufactured a 36-color marker set that was quite possibly the most glorious marker set that I ever owned. I first spotted it at my friend Rich’s house sometime in junior high. I think we were using it for homework assignments that required coloring–maybe a diagram–and he had this yellow bi-fold that was made of plastic and filled with 36 thin markers that were arranged in a gradient across the spectrum. The markers were also shaped like pens, so you held them in a similar fashion and could avoid getting your fingers too dirty (unlike Mr. Sketch or Crayola). I immediately put it on a gift list and got it–my parents were never going to balk at buying art supplies–and it was one of the best gifts I ever got. I mean, I took more care of those markers than I’d ever cared for any pack of crayons. I’d make sure they stayed capped and always arranged them in the right order. 

That set lasted me a few years, giving up the ghost about halfway through high school when the markers started to die out one by one. And I don’t think ‘d color anything for quite a while because 18-year-olds didn’t buy a lot of coloring books and crayons for fun. Plus, by the 1990s, all of the good coloring books of my youth had bitten the dust. Oh sure, I could have bought something from my local stationary store, but the appeal of a coloring book when you were a kid was that you got to color your favorite characters. Spider-Man is a lot more fun with the Crayola 64-pack than having to color “random boy in a field”. Or maybe I’m wrong and “random boy in a field was a hot ticket coloring book. Really, though, superhero coloring books were always so great, as were those from movies like Star Wars and Star Trek.

Now, I didn’t have a vintage 1977 Star Wars coloring book because I’m not old enough to have lived back then. Or maybe I did? All I know is that I don’t remember seeing them, although their covers were not the most unique among Star Wars merch because their pictures were on tons of other stuff like action figure cards and in my Star Wars books on tape and storybook. So claiming to have one is more of a Mandela effect on my part. But I know I had cooling books for Empire and Jedi.

Okay, having a Return of the Jedi coloring book wasn’t rare. There was so much merchandise for that movie that I’m pretty sure we were issued the coloring books. Actually, we often got them as party favors, so I guess they were and I’m pretty sure I had more than one coloring book with a cover featuring Max Rebo on keyboards. But The Empire Strikes Back? Well, that was always a little more precious because Empire was the movie I saw last, watching a pirated copy on my Uncle Lou’s television in 1984 months before it finally made its way to video. Prior to that, I knew the story from what I could glean from various action figures, Burger King glasses, the storybook, and the coloring books. In 1980, I turned three, so those coloring books were probably my first exposure to anything in the movie and I remember wondering what was going on in some of the covers that featured the Bespin scenes. Empire is the best of the Star Wars movies (Star Wars is still my favorite) and it always seemed to me that its dark mood carried over into the merchandise. 

From what I have seen, Star Wars had a “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” 1970s feel, especially since nobody thought the film would be what it was. Jedi, though? Well that was a menagerie and a lot of fun. Empire has a darker palette and fewer creatures. In fact, it’s the most character driven of the original trilogy (The Last Jedi comes close). Of course, I didn’t realize that at three, so I just scribbled all over every page. A few years after that, would find the coloring books in a desk draw and spend time “correcting” those scribbles, re-coloring the pages to make them look neater. By then, I’d watched Empire tons of times and so the covers’ mysteries were solved. I eventually lost interest and they went back into that desk drawer where they sat until they were eventually thrown away.

Also in that desk drawer, though, were Star Trek coloring books. My memories of Trek prior to The Voyage Home coming out in 1986 are sketchy but I k now I had these because the pictures on the front were all from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. While I’m not surprised that ST:TMP had coloring books, I still kind of am because it’s not a movie you show kids unless you need to get them down for a nap (sorry Gene, but at four years old, I would have not made it all the way through V’Ger). I know that the pages of the coloring books featured a lot of drawings that looked like they were from the original television show, so they were most likely refits of older books. It’s also probably where I’d learned who Kirk and Spock were. Well, that and my cousin’s old Mego dolls that had were in rough condition (I remember Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and a Klingon). When I realized what I actually had, I was in late elementary and junior high, watching Star Trek movies on a regular basis. So this was more cool to me tan anything because I remember being entranced by the covers–the pictures and the logo (which for the record is my all-time favorite Star Trek logo) felt sophisticated. Yeah, I don’t know why either, but I do know that I was probably the only guy in my junior high school who was into Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Like I said, all of these coloring books were eventually thrown away as the ephemera of childhood was purged. I reconnected with coloring twice in my adult life. The first time was in college where my RA gave us crayons as well as a coloring page of the Mona Lisa. I don’t remember why we were given them, but a classmate of mine wrote a wonderful essay about how she and her friend decided to not color her in the way you’d expect. That idea of free expression was really cool. And then, in my thirties, I had a kid of my own that crayons and coloring books were in my house again. This time, though, it was mostly Spider-Man (who has been a coloring book mainstay, although I don’t remember coloring book pages looking as hot as the one with Terry Dodson’s drawing of Black Cat). Brett also had a huge coloring book dedicated to Peeps. Yes, Peeps. Brett and I would color together from time to time and it was fun, so when those “adult” coloring books became popular, I saw the appeal. We’ve got a few, including a Wonder Woman one with art from George Perez and Phil Jimenez and I have one put out by Charles Vess, which I bought from him at the Baltimore Comic-Con about ten years ago. I’ve colored all of one page because his drawings are so gorgeous that I’m afraid to ruin them, even though I will say that I am better about staying inside the lines.