Not Another Crummy Comic

I’ve been asked by a few people about the comics that I’ve been drawing for these blogs. So allow me to tell the story…

Many years ago, I was on my high school’s newspaper staff – the Rebel Rouser, at least for a portion of my high school career. When I joined, we had one guy on staff who was the official Rebel Rouser cartoonist. The job of the cartoonist was to be the Johnny on the Spot when it came time to finalize the newspaper layout. The general rule of layouting was that all spaces on a newspaper needed to be filled with something, whether it was words or photos or diagrams or headlines or captions or… comics. So for the Rebel Rouser, comics were just filler for articles that needed some physical padding on the page. That’s where our hero the cartoonist came in. When the layout was being finalized and the editor in chief noticed that an article was going to run a little short or a photo that was going to be included didn’t turn out so hot or some other random reason, the cartoonist would jump in, sketch out something somewhat applicable to the article, and bam, problem solved.

The problem with our cartoonist when I joined up was he… shall I say, lacked in ambition. A person with little self-motivation doesn’t quite jive with being “Johnny on the Spot”. And the fact that he also failed to write any articles himself, he was given the boot and our sponsoring teacher was in a fix to find a new cartoonist, and fast.

This is where I entered the picture. When our teacher asked if anyone was interested in drawing the comics, I immediately piped up, “I’ll do it!” Not that I was a good artist, far from it. It just sounded like something fun to do at the time. My teacher, however, wisely said, “I’ll need to see some drawings that I can look over before I give you the job.” And it just happened that I had some, on a huge collection of church bulletins.

Throughout my entire life, my parents regularly attended church, week after week dragging me along. And because by the time I hit middle school church service was about as exciting to me as watching a locust molt, I regularly made good use out of the church bulletins. Instead of listening intently and connecting with the deeper meaning of the pastor’s sermons, as I’m sure most middle schoolers do, I busied myself doodling on the bulletins, drawing mostly made up comics that were about as random as an octopus playing chopsticks in a desert with Phil Donahue.

So the day after volunteering for the cartoonist position, I slapped a huge stack of bulletins that I had saved onto my teacher’s desk. She looked at the bulletins, looked at me, then at the bulletins, and then said, “Sure, you’ll do.” Months later after she admitted that I was actually getting better, I said, “Really? So does that mean I was bad initially?” To which she said, “Not really. But I didn’t give you the spot because of your drawings. I gave it to you because of the church bulletins. In my experience, Christian students are more reliable.” I’m not going to mention my teacher’s name because she still works in the school system and I certainly wouldn’t want to get her into trouble for saying something quasi-positive about a religion via sharing an observational truth with a student. You could just imagine the repercussions.

So that’s the story, at least how I started with the comics. Actually, I stopped drawing at the end of high school and didn’t start again until recently when I started this blogging thing and, like the newspaper, I needed something as a filler. Besides, people tend to read this blogs when there’s a picture involved. I still would never claim to be any good at drawing. But, I guess it serves its purpose.