Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet, and we already have a Christmas strip.
Well, I’m going through the strips more or less in order, and this one sets up the next dozen, so here ya go. Merry Christmas.
Now the backstory. Mr. Squish was obviously not the only strip in the Sac State Hornet in Fall 1990. Predating my strip was this fellow named Wayne Kunert, who drew a strip called, at the time, “Squidman.” (It changed names a few times since.) Because both Wayne’s strip and mine had titles with “squi” in them, this managed to completely confuse tons of inattentive, weed-addled Sac State students, who mixed up one with the other, or frappéd them together. “Oh,” I’d hear from time to time, “you’re the guy who draws Mr. Squidman.” So would Wayne. I found it amusing. Not sure Wayne did.
There was no character in Squidman actually named Squidman. The primary character was “the Teenage Martyr,” a whiny emo kid who regularly contemplated suicide. At the end of each semester, Wayne would have him start to go through with it… but he never followed through. The tease.
So at the end of the Fall 1990 semester, I egged Wayne to finally pull the trigger. “Kill him off,” I said. “Defecate or get off the pot.”
“You kill Squish off,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll both kill our characters off.”
Hence the above strip. I done killed ’im off. Wayne, on the other hand, drew a strip in which the Teenage Martyr was about to jump off the Guy West Bridge… and, in the end, didn’t. Wimped out again. Worst profanity you can imagine.
Santa’s line, “I’m sorry you saw me… now I’ll have to kill you,” was yet another inside joke. It’s something my high school friends and I used to say to one another whenever we unexpectedly ran into one another. Say I stepped into the local Burger King and found one of my homeboys there: “I’m sorry you saw me. Now I’ll have to kill you.” And we’d laugh. So for their amusement and mine, I put it in a strip. I thought it’d be hilarious coming from Santa. No wonder no one had ever seen him drop off Christmas presents.
A few years later I wound up reading, and later buying, The Big Book of New American Humor. It contained the following cartoon, drawn by Nick Downes:
“I’m sorry you saw me Timmy, now I’ll have to kill you.”
Nope, no kidding.
Downes’s cartoon predated mine, so there’s no way he could’ve plagiarized me. It’s just one of those freaky instances where two people have the very same idea. Difference is, he got paid for it. All I got was some second-place College Intercollegiate Press Association award.
We don’t actually see the bullet hit Leonard. So presumably that’s an “out” I could finagle my way around, if I wanted to keep Leonard alive. But that wasn’t my intent. As far as I was concerned, Leonard really was killed and dead. Period.
So how could “Mr. Squish” continue if Mr. Squish was killed off? Oh, it’s possible. Just you wait.
Ah, the award. Yeah, I actually won one for this strip. Dave Bromfield, my editor, entered it in the Best Weekly Comic Strip category for CIPA’s yearly awards. I won second place for 1991. As I recall, Wayne deservedly won first place.
CIPA, like the Journalism Association of Community Colleges, exists for two reasons: They hold a yearly convention, which is primarily an excuse for university students to take a road trip to some hotel, and party all weekend. And they give out awards for best this, that, and t'other, and you put all these awards on your résumé in the vain hope they’ll impress prospective employers. Yep, it’s a wankfest.
In ’91, Sac State was the host college for the CIPA awards. My friend Tricia Reader was in charge of putting it together, and she drafted me into designing the programs and proctoring one of the on-the-spot competitions: A bunch of feature writers had to review a Howard Finster exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum. And I got to see how these awards were decided. It made me lose all respect for the way any awards are decided.
“Best Weekly Comic Strip” wasn’t based on the overall output of a cartoonist’s semester. It’s entirely based on a single strip. I could’ve drawn 20 horrible strips and one brilliant one, and the solitary fluke would net me an award, which’d beat every cartoonist in the state who drew 21 good strips. Didn’t seem right. But that’s how it worked.
When we were given our awards, inexplicably we were also given the judges’ tally sheets. The list of criteria we were scored on, to me, didn’t seem relevant in the slightest. Comic strips are secondarily about the art. Primarily they’re about getting your message across. They’re about the writing. The art isn’t irrelevant; it’s gotta help you get the message across. But my judges judged it on the art. Mainly whether they liked the art. Hey, they didn’t have a semester’s worth of strips to look at, so they had no idea whether I was an effective communicator. They had to judge it on something, and in the absence of anything valid, they picked aesthetics.
One judge complained, fr’instance, that the first panels of my strip had a lot of detail in them, whereas the last panels didn’t. He assumed I did a rush job on the last panels, and docked points for it. Another found it off-putting how the last two panels were slightly higher than the others, and docked points for it. Another didn’t understand why I included the Springsteen quote at the end of the strip. Now, had he seen the entire semester’s run, he’d have known this was my regular thing. Of course he docked points for it.
It was all sorts of irrelevant, minor, stupid things. The end result was I got 60-something points out of a possible 100. I won’t say what Wayne got for his first-place strip, but it was also much lower than it should’ve been.
Before this experience, somehow it never occurred to me these judges would be peers. I assumed they’d be college professors, and know what they were talking about. Instead, the judges weren’t even cartoonists. They were reporters at Sacamento-area media outlets. Now, they’d argue, and firmly believe, they weren’t my peers, ’cause I was still an undergrad and they were paid for a living. In which case they’d be wrong. Peerdom is based on equal ability and knowledge, not equal employment. Some of these judges were utter hacks, who happened to say yes when Tricia was asking around for judges. It fed their egos to serve as judges. Some of them had never been to journalism school themselves, and their writing showed it. Many of the Hornet’s staff could write rings around them.
Every so often I come across a high school or college newspaper. Out of curiosity, I read it. Nearly every one has a kid with talent: They can outdo most working reporters when it comes to writing style and research ability. The best reporters know this, and encourage ’em to join the ranks. The hacks fear them, and regularly cut them down, lest they someday lose their jobs to them—or are forced to step up their own game.
Some peers can be thoughtful and conscientious. Some can be idiots. Anyone who’s served on a jury knows this. Turns out my jury was packed with idiots. As a result, I lost nearly all my interest in participating in such competitions. I won a few journalism awards since, but if I didn’t win, I didn’t sweat it: I found out who the judges were, and they had no business judging anyone.
I have other CIPA stories, but I’ll save those for the relevant comic strip. Yes, there’s a relevant comic strip. Stay tuned.