Like you and your friends, me and my friends used to make comic strips back in the nineteen hundreds. That’s just what we did, yo. It was back before I burned out in a tragic blaze of sleep deprivation and mediocrity that led me to seek other forms of self expression, such as animation and drunk. As for all my comic-making friends, well, they just grew up and got over it, yo.

Recently, several nice people (mostly from Singapore) emailed asking about a comic I did for Universal Press Syndicate years ago. I looked back over some of that old work. Most of it is painful to see now, of course.

Anyway, I’ve never put any of that stuff online before, so I thought I’d post a couple things, if only for my own indulgence. If anyone is interested, here is the story of my comic strip making days:

COMICS, PART 1: THE COLLEGE YEARS

Back at the University of Arizona, as an engineering student, I started publishing some comics in our school newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

As chance would have it, the Wildcat had an amazing lineup of cartoonists all publishing at the same time. We also had a local weekly paper called the Tucson Comic News, which published full-page Krazy Kat spreads. The friendly competition and exposure to George Herriman made our work better (at least, it did for me). Here are just a few of the people we had in our comics page scene back in my day:

Chad Strawderman – became a drunk, killed a man, moved to Alaska, killed an elk

Jeff Barfoot – became a drunk, moved to Dallas (necessitating additional drinking), briefly served time in El Paso for alleged involvement with a hooker known as “The Argentine Firecracker,” and for attempting to bribe the arresting officer with a roasted chicken

Wes Hargis – always has been a drunk, speaks fluent spanglish, recently injured while beating up a tree with a shovel handle

Joe Forkan – became a drunk, started painting pictures of the world “as Joe sees it”

Adam Rex – finally stopped drinking, wrote some great books, began drinking again, wrote even better books, spent the money on booze

My first two semesters, I started off with a couple of inconsequential comics that led to nothing but public embarrassment (in other words, practice). The first one was called “San Jacques,” and was about some people or something. The second was about squirrels, but I don’t remember the name. During that first year, I learned the two most important lessons in cartooning:

1. Yes, the comics tend to suck in newspapers. But have you ever tried to write a tidy little joke and draw it up… EVERY DAY…FOR YEARS ON END? It’s really fucking hard.

2. It might be possible to do a comic in which a squirrel character serves as a symbol for some aspect of human nature. But it is not possible to make a comic that is literally about actual squirrels. They have nothing to teach us.

Luckily, I was oblivious to how bad I sucked. The best way to learn to make comics is to just keep making them every day, under the looming fear of deadlines and public humiliation. I guess anyone’s first 200 or so comics are probably going to suck (and for most of us, so will the next 1000) so it’s good to get them out of your system. Eventually the thrill of seeing your work in print wears off, and you start trying to actually entertain your audience.

My second year, I took it more seriously. I got a quill pen and bristol board, and invented a cool cross hatching technique. I took a couple art classes. I started a comic called The Masked Galloot (a misspelling of the word galoot that I didn’t catch until 2 semesters into the strip) It was about the daily life of a Don Quixote-esque super hero. That is, he was a pretend, imaginary superhero, who had no powers other than his own delusion. Once in a while he’d try to fight crime, but mostly he just hung around with his friends.

Here is one example of The Masked Galloot. This comic was apparently constructed entirely around the phrase “bastard file,” a hilarious term I had probably heard for the first time that day:

It wasn’t great, but it was my first comic that actually sort of worked. It began to catch on around campus too. Some of my proudest moments in college were the occasions when I would find Masked Galloot graffiti scrawled on a chalkboard or a sidewalk. The next year, I began selling a collection of the strip in the student bookstore, called “Godzilla vs. The Masked Galloot.” A rare collector’s item! (as you can see on the cover, at the time I was going by the ridiculous pen name, “C. S. Harding”)

After three semesters I decided it was time for something new. I started a comic called Feet of Clay. It centered around a monkey named Abbott, who worked in various monkey jobs– science lab, circus, NASA test pilot program… Here is a sample:

During my senior year I even began self-syndicating Feet of Clay in other college newspapers. I think I got it up to about 15-ish papers– hot damn! I also sold a collection of those comics at the student bookstore.

Creatively, Feet of Clay began some characters and themes I’m still trying to figure out today. For example, there was a robot named Herriman, who later evolved into the robot in my first animated short, He’s a Good Monkey, and may even come back in a different form in a future project: (stay tuned for that)

And in looking through the old strips, I found a minor character I had forgotten about– a lab assistant named Dennis. I always drew Dennis with my left hand so he’d look weird. (in retrospect, he looks much better than the other characters– maybe I’m latently left-handed)

Anyway, that’s about what I did in college, yo. Maybe I’ll scan in a few more soon.

Tune in to the next post for… PART 2: SYNDICATION!