The Mr. Squish universe is a Calvinist one. In it Leonard was predestined for wrath.
I had one final strip for Fall 1990. I and Wayne, the cartoonist who produced “Squidman” for the Hornet, had entered a death pact: We were gonna kill off our main characters. His Teenage Martyr would finally succeed at one of his many threatened suicides, and I would have Leonard get whacked. But Wayne reneged.
When I drew this strip, I assumed the Teenage Martyr would hang himself off the Guy West Bridge, as expected, and decided to depict his afterlife. And Leonard’s. As shown above.
Credit where credit’s due: Warren Nicht, my future Arts & Features assistant editor, came up with the idea of putting the Martyr and Leonard in hell together, to torment one another. It escalated from there into a full-on Squidman parody. So if these characters don’t look familiar at all, and look nothing like my drawing style, that’s ’cause I was mimicking Wayne’s. I stole his character Eddie Ties to play a devil. (Not the devil; just a devil. Wearing devilish footy pajamas.)
I sorta made myself insane trying to get the art to look exactly like Wayne’s. One of my pet peeves are those folks who try to parody other strips, yet don’t even try to get the art right. It’s Calvin and Hobbes as they would draw ’em, or Charlie Brown and Snoopy as depicted in their universe. That’s not parody. I read tons of Mad Magazine as a kid. Their artists were consistently good at knocking off the original so well, you could slip somebody the fake, and freak ’em out for a minute till they realized it was a joke. That’s the standard I set for myself.
Impossibly high? Nah. Worst case I could always photocopy their heads and paste ’em into my strip. Instead I made myself bonkers with the blue pencil and some of Wayne’s old strips, trying to draw the Martyr and Eddie till they looked right.
Now, the proper way to do this would be tracing—you know, like I used to do back when I was a kid. But I didn’t want to be accused of tracing. Not sure why. It was some ridiculous point of pride in being able to draw it freehand, but tracing would’ve been way easier. I could’ve knocked it out in a few minutes instead of hours. In the end, I was accused of tracing it anyway—which I decided to consider something to be proud of, instead of annoyed.
In any event I kept drawing, and redrawing, and re-redrawing; then inking, then wite-outing, then inking again. Like I said, bonkers.
Since I drew with ballpoint and Sharpies, and Wayne drew with (I believe) fountain pen, it was bound to be subtly different. Notice my lines are all the same width. You can try to mimic fountain-pen-style lines, by drawing every line, then going over it again to create subtle differences in width. But I had spent enough time on this strip; I wasn’t willing to go that nuts. I got it to my satisfaction, and was done.
You’d have to be a regular Squidman reader to get the references to the Cure CDs, or Fresno, or the made-for-TV movie about a retarded kid. (Starring, of course, Lindsay Wagner.) But I’m sure spending eternity with one another would be both the Martyr and Leonard’s idea of a personal hell. So there y’are.
And that’s it for the Fall 1990 semester. Next: Spring ’91.