Back to blogging on Mr. Squish.

Somehow, Thursdays have become “Throwback Thursdays” for a lot of people, in which they show old pictures of themselves, “back in the day,” which depending on how old they are, was either decades ago, or two years ago ’cause their friends don’t know what they looked like in junior high.

Whereas I have 24-year-old comic strips.

The above (which you can click to embiggen) is the first “Mr. Squish” strip I drew for the CSU Sacramento Hornet. (Not yet the State Hornet.) I’d drawn “Mr. Squish” for the Solano Community College Tempest in spring 1990, and I still haven’t tracked down my copies of it, but I have most of my strips from my Sac State years, so here ya go.

When I transferred to CSUS, I joined the staff of the Hornet. Because I knew Chris McSwain, the assistant editor-in-chief, I was appointed Graphics Coordinator. It wasn’t a thankless job; people thanked me all the time. But it was a job nobody else really wanted: We were all journalism majors, and this was commercial graphic design. You gotta have some ability in that area.

I was a journalism major, who learned graphic design ’cause I sat down on the computer and plugged away at PageMaker and Illustrator and Photoshop till I got the hang of them; then read a bunch of graphic design books until I got rid of the happy-go-publishing mentality. (“Ooh, look at all these special effects! Let’s use all of them!”) Self-taught, but I could do it. And the job was to produce all the ads, infographics, and art for a twice-weekly 30-page paper.

It’s a crazy-busy job when you’re doing it alone. But I plastered the Graphic Arts Department with flyers, and got myself a staff of nine Graphic Arts students. They did an awesome job. But apparently I ruined them for the Graphic Arts Department: I got ’em thinking commercially instead of artistically, which was not what their professors wanted. Thereafter the professors discouraged students from joining the Hornet staff. Jerks.

I was hoping to get a weekly column on the op/ed pages, like I had at the Tempest. Then again, so did everyone else on the staff. Journalism students are opinionated like that. So the column was a big no. But there was another way to get on the op/ed pages, and all it took was my limited ability to draw.

I grew up drawing comic strips for fun. I was heavily influenced by “Peanuts,” “Garfield,” Mad Magazine, and “Bloom County.” (I don’t find “Bloom County” funny anymore, ’cause its humor entirely comes from absurdity and pop-culture references. But I was a kid; what did I know?). In high school I filled notebooks with comic strips. But I only ever published one in the school paper. At church, I drew comic strips of the sermon, which were published in the church’s bulletin, and I had a pretty big fan following there.

At Solano I pitched a strip called “Steroid Man,” about someone on the track team who hulks out on ’roids, causing him to win every event, but much of the humor came from the rage-filled side effects. It was like a silly “Incredible Hulk.” Chris, then the Tempest’s editor-in-chief, roundly rejected it. As the faculty adviser rightly pointed out, Solano didn’t have a serious steroid problem (that we know about). I argued this was a good thing; nobody could accuse me of mocking a current campus problem. But Chris was never gonna run it. So I set it aside.

The next year, with Chris at CSUS, I invented “Mr. Squish.” And since I was the co-editor-in-chief, I ran it.

Writers get asked all the time where our ideas come from. The answer is ridiculously simple: We steal ’em. We take ideas from anywhere and everywhere. Books we’ve read, movies we’ve seen, conversations we’ve had—we steal every idea we can get our grubby little hands on. But instead of putting them down as we heard them (’cause that’d be plagiarism), we ask, “What if I just changed this about it?” or mash it up with another idea. Unless we’re hopelessly lazy joke thieves, we futz with the original idea until it’s either unrecognizable, or mostly unrecognizable but still intriguing. “Genius” is when the end result looks like nothing else out there—or is more entertaining than the herd of similar-looking product. But entirely new ideas? There ain’t no such animal.

In a poorly-written satirical column I wrote months before, I joked about a hypothetical “Mr. Squish comic strip” in a poorly-read college paper. (The word “squish” came from a memorable joke in a sitcom I’d seen months before that.) So when I decided to create a strip, I started with the name, then invented the characters. Originally there were two: An overly-anxious college student named Randall MacFloon, and his overly-laid back antagonist, Leonard Squish.

The names came from a few different sources. “Squish” is an onomatopoetic sound effect, so I borrowed one of Don Martin’s for MacFloon. Randall came from Tony Randall of The Odd Couple. Squish had no other name—and “Squish” wasn’t his real name; I made him a punk rocker who thought it cool to call himself “Squish.” It wasn’t till Sac State that I decided to make it his last name. Leonard came from Leonard Nimoy.

The premise: Leonard was a punk. Randall was as nervous as a chihuahua. Leonard’s devil-may-care attitude and tendency to culture-bash (like me, of course), made the status-quo-seeking Randall insane.

For the Hornet I toned Leonard down. Gone were the wifebeaters and dog collars: I lowered his spikes, and made him wear ties. I liked the juxtaposition of spiky hair and a tie. Remember, this was 1990: Spiky hair wasn’t mainstream yet. I was way ahead of the trend. Not that I was trying to start one.

True, I was accused of ripping off Bart Simpson for Leonard’s look. But I’d been drawing variations of Leonard for years before The Tracy Ullman Show started showing the Simpsons shorts. (For all the good that argument does me.)

This was actually the second “Mr. Squish” strip I drew for the Hornet. Here’s the first one. It was my quick ’n dirty attempt to introduce Leonard and Randall to Sac State.

But Chris, now the assistant editor-in-chief and editorial page editor, didn’t know, nor care, about their backstory. He rejected it. He objected to the “spaced-out freak athiest [sic] dog-hating left-wing lunatic” description Randall hyperventilated over. He was afraid that by making Randall worried about these characteristics, it was my intention to offend every stoner, freak, atheist, dog-hater, lefty, and lunatic on the campus.

You see, Chris knew me at Solano College as a knee-jerk right-wing idiot. (Which I was. No, seriously. I’m a lot better now.) He was understandably concerned that I’d fill the strip with my then-usual right-wing idiocy and polarize the Hornet’s readership. He didn’t want that if he could avoid it. Plus, he didn’t find the strip funny. He found it juvenile and sophomoric.

“There’s nothing wrong with sophomoric,” I said. “People laugh at sophomoric.”

He could live with sophomoric, but he just didn’t care for how Randall envisioned a worst-case roommate. He wanted that entire panel removed. Densely, I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t find a single thing Randall said to be offensive. Maybe not politically correct, but Randall was going to be heavily discomfited by Leonard, so if you don’t like Randall’s worldview, you side with Leonard, right? Something for everyone.

“No,” Chris finally said. “It’s not running. Draw another.”

Pissed, I went off and drew another. That one, the one on top of this piece, Chris approved of. And he felt rather pleased with how his firmness had forced a superior strip out of me. I agree the top strip is funnier. But I was still irritated about being edited. Or “censored,” as I was then choosing to call it.

Chris left the staff about a week later, for personal reasons. After he left, I ran far more sophomoric strips than this one. I even won a California Intercollegiate Press Association award for one of the dumber strips.

Chris felt one of an editor’s duties is to mentor their staff, and improve them. I disagree entirely. The mentor/pupil arrangement works best when voluntary on the pupil’s part. The mentor gets you to act by convincing you their way is right—or at least that it’s worth a try. Bosses, on the other hand, simply give orders. As do parents, cult leaders, and other sucky mentors, who don’t know the difference between leading and pushing, and often don’t have time to care.

I’d like to say Chris’s constructive criticism brought out the best in me. As, likely, would he. But it’s not true. I resented the hell out of it. I was used to drawing what I wished, and his editing seemed to me to be arbitrary or paranoid. I was pretty relieved when he left the staff; I then answered directly to Dave Brumfield, the editor-in-chief, who shared my sense of humor and let me run whatever I drew.

Two years later Chris became editor-in-chief, and asked me to come back as Graphics Coordinator. And we clashed regularly. Again, he kept trying to “fix” things I didn’t consider broken. The fact that “Squish” was so popular at CSUS seemed to dumbfound him. To his mind, I was still the angry right-wing columnist he’d met at Solano, whom everybody hated. (Well, everybody he knew. My fellow nutjobs were on my side.) But everyone assumed Leonard is secretly me, and since Leonard is a lefty—so I could make fun of lefties, of course—I must be a lefty. Chris figured it was only a matter of time before people figured out who I really was, and then there’d be trouble. So he tried to hold off anything he found too controversial.

To be fair to Chris: I was a bull-headed jerk at the time. Chris may actually have improved my strips, but I wasn’t in any mindset to see it. I was too frustrated about being “censored.” My other editors, who agreed with me that humor is subjective, had given me a free hand. And they had a broader sense of humor than did Chris: They regularly got my jokes, whereas Chris regularly didn’t.

No, Chris isn’t the bad guy. He was my editor. Much as I disagreed with him, he had every right to edit my stuff. That’s the editor’s job, after all. I was just used to being off the leash. Even today I don’t agree with his edits, but that’s not the issue: My attitude was. Back then my attitude was, “Don’t like it? Profane command you.” Hardly Christian of me, I know. You’ll see a bit of this in the “Squish” strips.

Nowadays, I do care what others think. I’m trying to provoke, but not offend. Offense makes people irrational, and you can’t have a discussion when people are irrational. I didn’t realize this difference back then. I was too much a pessimist to believe I could have any meaningful discussion with opponents: I was right, they were wrong, that was that. But that was then. Today, I’m an optimist. And at the same time, I believe we’re all wrong. There, that’ll confuse you.

Well, between my bad attitude and our difference in leadership philosophy, Chris’s editing sucked all the fun out of my producing the strip. I was already struggling to juggle my job at the Sacramento Observer with my State Hornet duties. I put up with it for about a month, then figured, “Unnatural act this,” quit the State Hornet, and quit the strip. I’ve done other strips since, briefly; but not “Mr. Squish.”

But that’s getting way ahead of the story. This is only the first strip, after all.

Back to the top strip. I didn’t introduce Randall for a few weeks after it ran. By that time, I had redrawn him as a blond frat boy. Gradually his hyper-anxiety returned. And Leonard’s punk nature was largely gone, except for the hair and sunglasses and culture-bashing. I kept putting him in ties.

…Oh, the Oscar Wilde quote. The Hornet used to run a “quote of the day” on the contents page. (More like a “quote of the twice-a-week.”) But that semester, the paper had been redesigned to look more like a tabloid than a magazine. I was fond of quotation books at the time, so I figured if we wouldn’t have one on the front page, we could have one in my strip. After a year, I got tired of looking up an appropriate (or out-of-context) quote for every strip. I dropped them, to some protests from fans.

In spring 1991 I recycled the “censored” strip. I tweaked it a bit to fit the continuity: Randall had blond hair, and instead of “spilled a beer” it was “spilled a Mountain Dew,” which was slightly funnier. I’ll post it eventually.