Mr. Squish and useless teachers.

This strip got me in trouble. Not for the reasons you’d think. I figured if I were to get any grief at all about it, it’d be from slacker professors who felt my portrayal hit way too close to home, and who were too dumb to pretend it was some other guy I was making fun of, not them.

No, I didn’t catch—and maybe neither did you—what it was about this strip that profoundly offended people, causing three students to angrily come to the Hornet offices to request my head on a stick, a phone call from the faculty chair of a department, and an official letter in my file. Neither did I.

It’s two little words in the first panel: “RLS 30.”

Before I delve into that whole deal, there was a point to this strip, which got lost in the kerfuffle. Lemme rant on that first.

I’ve had many useless teachers. I had a physical science teacher who set up ten experiments round the room, then sat at his desk and read magazines while the rest of us goofed off and sometimes looked at the experiments. I had an algebra teacher who spent the first ten minutes of class introducing the lesson, then spent the next 40 minutes at his desk, hands covering his face, while we goofed off; we used to joke he was praying for death to take him. (Is it any wonder I didn’t care for math and science till college?)

These guys had tenure. That was why. Unless they molested the students, they’d never be fired.

When teachers give up like that, you’d think the schools would give them unimportant subjects, or give them all the problem students—sort of a way of saying, “You’ve given up, and so have they; you’re made for each other.” But no. Some of us were slackers, and appreciated the free periods; some of us were overachievers who were really frustrated by how little the teachers cared.

Sad to say, in high school I was one of the slackers. The only classes I cared about were history and Spanish. The rest… I was gonna be a cartoonist. What did I need algebra for? And nobody bothered to explain it to me. Even Dad, who was an avionics engineer for crying out loud, never explained the purpose of algebra; he just ordered me to do better in it. My C’s weren’t gonna cut it. (And one grading period in the spring semester, I got a D, which meant I had to do summer school to make up for it.) But I didn’t care if my teacher sucked; it gave me a whole free period to draw cartoons in.

In college, my attitude changed completely. After all, now I was paying for these classes: I wanted my money’s worth. True, the state was subsidizing the heck out of it, but the token $15 fee per class at Solano College and the $578.75 fee per class at CSUS (ah, the good old days when California actually funded its schools) was just enough to make me care. Suddenly I joined the crowd of overachievers who were outraged when our teachers didn’t actually teach.

When you write a story, you need to flesh out the backstories for your characters. I learned that in junior high from my English teacher, Mrs. Sakai. (Who was certainly not a slacker teacher.) You can’t just throw items into the backstory as you tell your story. You can try, like TV shows do, but you might notice the TV shows which do this tend to really annoy the fans. “What do you mean, he has a brother who works for the State Department? How come he’s never mentioned this brother before? Especially during that episode when he lost his passport and had to go to Mexican jail! That’d be the first person I’d call! Oh, this show has so jumped the shark.” And so on.

Anywho, I invented a backstory for Leonard when I drew the strip at Solano College, and rejiggered it when I ported the strip to Sac State. At first I toyed with the idea of him as an undeclared major… and after five years of never being able to make up his mind, he finally wrapped up a degree in General Studies. This way I could put him into any classroom I wished. But nah; Leonard wasn’t aimless. I don’t find aimlessness funny. Leonard had goals. Wrong goals, which is where the humor came from.

So I made Leonard into the type of guy who knew what he wanted to be when he grew up, ever since he was a little kid. And he never changed his mind. Seriously, such people do exist. Little kids say, “I want to be a veterinarian when I grow up cause I love animals,” and they never deviate from that course: They go to vet school and become vets. Sometimes that’s because their parents are impressed—“Wow, our kid wants to be a doctor”—and encourage the heck out of ’em. And sometimes they’re just that focused.

I was not one of those kids.

According to my parents, the first career field I ever talked about was becoming a firefighter. Mainly this was because I had a firefighter playset. It had a fire truck, ladders, a tall building to rescue people from; the truck had a siren; the hoses had this little squeeze attachment you could fill with water. It was a fun toy. Why wouldn’t you want to do that for a living? That is, till you discovered actual fire.

Then for quite a few years I wanted to be Batman. No, seriously. I saw the live-action TV show, and it looked easy. All you had to do was put on a costume and get into fistfights with criminals, who for some reason never thought to shoot the silly bastard in the leotard. Maybe they’d stick you in some elaborate deathtrap, but that was as difficult as it got, and your utility belt had everything in it. You’d bust out, then catch them, beat the living tar out of them, and job well done. So from about age 5 to age 10, I focused on being Batman. I got a Batman encyclopedia, read a bunch of comic books, made a Batman costume… although for some reason everybody kept instantly figuring out my secret identity. But after age 10 I gave up on being Batman, and decided upon cartooning.

Mom and Dad both figured cartooning, like Batman, was just a phase. It was a 15-year phase, so you gotta give me some credit for thinking it was my life’s calling. The last years overlapped with my interest in journalism, and that became my eventual career. But that’s me. I knew other kids who always wanted to be doctors, so they became doctors; always wanted to be writers, so they became writers; always wanted to be mechanics, so they became mechanics.

For a while, I thought about making it so Leonard always wanted to be Batman. So he was studying criminal justice; Sac State had a well-known criminal justice program. But then I thought of the other cheesy TV show I used to watch religiously as a little kid: The Love Boat. It was on at 9 p.m. Saturday nights—my parents’ date night—and I could usually talk our babysitters into letting me stay up to watch it. Fantasy Island less often.

Special bonus strip! From February 1991.

Love Boat’s formula was usually three interlocking stories: (A) A serious romance, (B) a comedic romance, and (C) the crew’s wacky hijinks, often centered around “Gopher,” the ship’s yeoman purser, and Isaac, the ship’s bartender. Till adulthood, I didn’t know at all what a yeoman purser did. Gopher’s job on that silly boat seemed to be to hang out with Isaac and do something crazy every week. That job looks fun. Why not have Leonard want that job?

(Yes, I know a purser handles money and financial transactions. But Leonard didn’t.)

So that became Leonard’s backstory: He wanted to be Gopher. He picked a major in Recreation and Leisure Studies. Yep, it’s an actual major at CSUS. Yep, you can make a career of it: Usually it’s in tourism, parks, campgrounds, outdoor recreation, sports, or youth services. When I decided to make Leonard major in it, I actually did some research on it.

Honestly, before I researched it I assumed it was a stupid program—studying recreation? Seriously? But once I looked into it, I learned better. And really, it has to be a serious program: You can’t get longterm funding for a stupid one.

If Leonard was an RLS major, he’d have to take an RLS class, right? So I put him in RLS 30, the introductory class. And then I said its professor was a waste of space.

Despite the research I had done into the RLS program, basic though it was, I hadn’t checked to see whether there was more than one RLS 30 class. I just assumed there was. There were always five or six different introductory classes in most majors. But the RLS program wasn’t a big one, and there was only one RLS 30 class—and I had inadvertently singled out one undeserving teacher, and ripped on her.

The day it ran, a delegation of students from that particular RLS 30 class came to rip me a new one. They assumed I meant to insult their professor. And I immediately apologized. (I pointed out to them: “You do notice I didn’t draw a woman in the second panel? I was going after lousy teachers. Not her.”)

They wanted a retraction in the newspaper. I promised I’d put one in the next strip. They wanted something on the editorial page. I told them they could write a letter and we’d print it, and I’d tack my own apology underneath it, if that helped. They grudgingly accepted that, then hectored me about how awesome their teacher was. I heard them out; I figured it was penance for my mistake. Well, some of the penance.

Next, I got a call from the associate dean of the RLS department, likewise asking to speak to the offending cartoonist. So I spent the next several minutes talking with him—beginning, naturally, with my apology. The rest of our conversation was friendly. He understood what I was aiming for, and missed. He didn’t care for slacker teachers either. He also said he’d done a little cartooning himself, so he understood the pressures I was under.

He really didn’t. The only pressure the job ever gave me was when I drew cartoons at the last minute. (Or when I inadvertently offended a whole department.) He was thinking of how hard it was to come up with material; I never had that problem. I don’t get writer’s block. Seriously. I always have ideas. My problem is which idea to go with, not a lack of them. If I ever ran out of ideas, I’d figure I had run dry, and quit.

Yeah, okay, be jealous of me. Now back to the story.

In any event, the dean was decent to me. I promised him I’d stick a retraction in the next strip—I had already drawn the rough draft—and he later sent me a letter for the file. For those of you unfamiliar with bureaucrat-speak, a “letter for the file” is when you write a letter, repeating everything you said in a previous conversation, just so you can have a written record of it, just in case. It’s to cover your behind. But it was a friendly conversation, so it was a friendly letter. I don’t think we published it in the Hornet. I think I still have it somewhere. I do carry a pack-ratting gene, you know.

My apology ran in the very next strip. Second special bonus strip!

I hadn’t realized till a few years ago: Randall’s statement in the third panel, “We would like to … apologize for any feelings that were hurt,” sounds an awful lot like one of those non-apology apologies. You know, like “I’m sorry you feel that way,” or “I’m sorry you were offended,” rather than “I’m sorry for what I did.” Honestly, it wasn’t my intent to weasel out of an actual apology. I was sorry.

Yeah, in including a punchline in the strip, I know I risked people interpreting my “apology strip” as insincere, or not serious. Especially since Leonard is far less apologetic than surprised that people actually read the strip… and goes a little power-mad at the end. But hey, it’s comedy. Every joke is a risk.

You notice some of my conservatism came out. At the time, I considered Women’s Studies to be one of those useless majors… kind of like I originally suspected the RLS major to be. I figured its only point was for angry women get together and fester over all the things that made them angry. And maybe turn lesbian. It’s the usual stereotype you find among knee-jerk conservatives.

Back then, you see, I believed the only point of college was to prepare for a career. So pragmatically, you oughta major in something career-minded. I was in journalism ’cause I wanted to be a reporter. Women’s studies majors wanted to be what, women’s studies professors? —Yeah, it’s entirely Neanderthal thinking. Clearly I don’t think that way anymore. I did, after all, switch my own major to Biblical and Theological Studies, with no plans whatsoever to go into ministry; after I graduated, I started another newspaper. I studied BTS for me, not for a career path. Unless it’s a STEM job, all most employers care about is a bachelor’s degree in anything, and experience. Mostly experience.

Well, this experience taught me why fiction is usually set in fictitious places. You know why Batman fights in Gotham City instead of Chicago? ’Cause the cops have to thoroughly suck in order for the city to need a Batman, and the Chicago P.D. wouldn’t at all appreciate being depicted that way, even if it is only a comic book. Chicago would hate Batman. But Gotham isn’t real, and can be bashed as much as the writers like.

Now, if I only had the foresight to give Leonard a completely fictitious major: I could’ve enrolled him in Toon-American Studies. I could’ve had all sorts of fun using that fictitious department as a satire of real departments: Full of useless professors, wasteful budgets, ignorant students, and so forth. I could’ve parodied the perdition out of every program at Sac State that pulled those types of stunts, and so gotten away with it. But I was too hung up on sticking Leonard in the real world. Silly me.

Eventually I learned better, but those strips come later.

Before I conclude, I’ll mention I recycled this idea for another comic strip I did five years later, after I dropped out of Sac State, and dropped back into Solano College to finally complete my A.A. in Journalism.

Third special bonus strip! “Useless Teachers” ran 26 April 1995.

In the case of “Useless Teachers,” I actually had a specific teacher in mind. He taught drama and speech at Solano in the 1980s. Just as the strip describes, he thought himself a fascinating raconteur, and he’d take up the entire class, three days a week, telling us theater and Hollywood anecdotes instead of teaching us how to be better speakers. At the end of each story, to justify telling it, he’d cap it with, “And that’s something you could give a speech about.”

Actually, the semester I took his class, I spent most mornings stoned. I have horrible seasonal allergies, and Solano College at the time was surrounded on three sides by open fields of pollen. (Today, an office park and suburbs west and southwest, but farmland and undeveloped weeds in every other direction.) So every morning before school, I’d take a powerful antihistamine—and because I hadn’t discovered my deep and abiding love for coffee till 1992 (if you can believe it), I spent most of that class in a glazed-over daze. I remember so little of it, other than his stories which I’d drowse through. I gave three speeches, and because I have no fear at all of public speaking, I improvised every single one. Got an easy A.

Well, it was six years later, and I was pretty sure that instructor was no longer there. Yet even so, I got an angry response for the Sunshine strip.

It was too ridiculous to take seriously. Some loony woman wrote a letter to the Tempest saying—I kid you not—I shouldn’t make fun of the mountain-climbing speech. The mountain-climbing speech, she stated, is an important introductory speech that every speech and debate student ought to become familiar with.

“What mountain-climbing speech?” I said to everyone within earshot when I read her letter. “There’s no such thing as a mountain-climbing speech. I made up the mountain-climbing speech. What, is there an actual mountain-climbing speech in the textbook that I stumbled into?”

The editor and I got hold of that year’s speech and debate textbook. Nope, no mountain-climbing speech. There is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, but that speech wasn’t in the textbook, so the writer can’t have been referring to it. We found nothing.

“She’s nuts,” concluded the editor.

“Some people just don’t have enough to complain about,” I figured.

And maybe that’s my life’s calling. I certainly do give them ammunition.