Mr. Squish’s memorial service.

When I first conceived this brilliant idea where Leonard Squish stayed dead, I figured I’d make it into a regular thing.

The characters in the strip would frequently refer to the recently departed Leonard, much like the Bloom County regulars kept referring to the recently departed Bill the Cat (until they cloned him). The strip would thereafter consist of Randall, Armand, and any other characters I added, and they’d continue the strip without him. And whenever it came up, “So why’s the strip still called ‘Mr. Squish’?” I could point out that I could rename it “Randall”… but there was no guarantee Randall wouldn’t get whacked at the end of the semester.

Nah. The strip would still be “Mr. Squish,” and regularly, to justify the name, they’d refer to the late Mr. Squish.

Yeah, dumb idea.

Mr. Squish is dead. Really most sincerely dead.

I killed off Leonard Squish in fall 1990, and I meant it. He was honest-to-goodness, no-fooling-around, dead.

Okay, some fooling around.

If you’re familiar with the term “comic book death,” you know when comic books kill someone, they never stay dead. They can always be brought back. Even when bringing ’em back would seriously mess up the storyline. Fr'instance Bruce Wayne’s parents, whose murder caused him to become Batman. If one of the Batman writers decided it’d be awesome to bring ’em back to life, via magic or some convoluted retcon or zombie science or Black Lantern power rings, they’ll be back before you can cry, Zatanna-style, “Srehtaefesroh!” Anyone can be brought back, and nearly everyone has. If you know of any exceptions, give it time. They’ll be back eventually.

Halloween with Linus and Mr. Squish.

Ran this one in Fall 1991. So yeah, it’s out of sequence, but appropriate for the day.

No, Leonard didn’t mean Linus any harm, which is why I tacked on that line, “Wanna buy a Fisher-Price chainsaw?” It’s Halloween; it’s a trick. The poor kid did need straightening out, in many ways.

Just for fun, let’s read a few things into Peanuts, shall we?

Lucy ran a psychiatry booth. Not the usual thing a little kid would do; put aside the fact Charles Schulz made the Peanuts gang do a lot of things little kids would do. Instead of a lemonade stand, she ran a psychiatry booth. Consider what sort of kid would come up with such an idea. Someone who figured she knew enough about psychiatry to peddle it to her friends, especially gullible ol’ Charlie Brown, right? Clearly someone who spent a lot of time with her own psychiatrist.

Mr. Squish goes to hell.

The Mr. Squish universe is a Calvinist one. In it Leonard was predestined for wrath. After—24-year-old spoiler coming—I had him killed in the last strip, I naturally sent him to hell.

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.

Mr. Squish meets Santa Claus.

Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet, and we already have a Christmas strip. I’m gonna catch it from all the folks who are pitching a fit, “It’s too soon for Christmas sales! It’s too soon for Christmas decorations! What?—a Christmas strip? How dare you! Bah humbug!” And so on.

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.

End of the semester, Mr. Squish style.

In my first semester at CSU Sacramento, image I had a classmate named Brad who did nothing but work on the school paper. Nothing. Yes, Brad had other classes; he was in the same Newswriting and Reporting class as I. But he barely went, never paid attention, and was forever asking me what he missed. He didn’t care about ethics, news judgment, learning to gather and confirm sources, copy-editing, headline-writing, or any of the nuts and bolts of reporting. He just wanted to see his byline in the paper. Which was seldom, as I recall.

Mr. Squish, lousy date.

If you’ve watched enough comedies, you’re likely familiar with the trope of the idiot manchild. There’s the Brothers Grimm version, which we see in fairytales and folklore and Adam Sandler movies, where by the end of the tale he learns something and grows up a little. There’s the Molière version, which we see in slapstick comedies and Will Ferrell movies, where the idiot learns nothing at all, yet succeeds regardless. And there’s the schlimazel, the luckless fool who learns nothing and wins nothing, who’s usually the bad guy in the Sandler and Ferrell movies, and who Leonard Squish most resembles.

But one of the common clichés we find paired with the idiot manchild is the disapproving girlfriend. Or wife, or friend’s wife, or boss, or mom, or some other significant female who rolls her eyes at all the shenanigans, yet loves the idiot manchild anyway. Unless she’s his mom, there’s no discernible reason for it. And when the manchild is also casting the movie, she’s ridiculously pretty; way out of the manchild’s league.

Mr. Squish and the Virgin Mary.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t rule out the possibility the Virgin Mary can, God permitting, appear to people. Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, after all. The problem is when people want Mary, or Jesus, or angels, or space aliens, to appear to them so bad, they’re willing to desperately grab onto anything. That’s kinda what happened in November 1990, both in Colfax, California, and in the above Mr. Squish strip.

This wasn’t new news, but it had just gone viral. (No, the term hadn’t been invented yet in 1990.) It hit the Sacramento Bee and the TV news, and people were starting to make pilgrimages to go see it. In fact, if you still wanna see it, the “sighting” is visible every morning between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m.

Mr. Squish and sucky music.

When I was a kid my musical choices were all over the place. I listened, as most kids do, to what my parents listened to. Unfortunately, in the 1970s, that was disco. And I wasn’t all that into disco. Apparently I had some taste. Not much though. Kids have no taste, as you can tell by their musical choices, and the fact the Disney Channel gets the ratings it does. They’re learning taste. Exposure to crap helps.

When I started listening to the radio, it was San Francisco’s KFRC, which was still on the AM dial (which was how I could pick it up in San Jose), and still doing the Boss Radio format: Top 30 songs, wacky disc jockeys like Dr. Donald D. Rose, and tons of commercials. Tons. Commercials after every song.

Mr. Squish and term limits.

In 1990 I was in favor of term limits. Not anymore. Twenty-four years of a short-sighted do-nothing California government, where the politicians only concentrate on their next job, has disabused me of that notion.

One can argue the Founders were in favor of term limits. After all, congressmen only get two-year terms. And yes, in the case of the House of Representatives, the idea was they would serve for brief lengths of time. But not so the Senate. Six-year terms, longer than that of the president; elected (at the time) by the state legislatures; vacancies immediately filled by the governors; staggered terms; the whole system was set up to encourage incumbency, longevity, and stability. Like Parliament, where the House of Commons could be turned over on a regular basis, but the House of Lords would always have the same lords in it, the idea was one house would be forever renewed, and the other not. Term limits for all? Goes against the intents of the Founders.

Mr. Squish, violent music critic.

If you don’t know who Milli Vanilli is, lucky you. They were a German pop/dance band which had a brief bit of popularity in the late 1980s. Their music was stupid, but as we all know, stupid sells; give it a good hook and strong bass, and people will instinctively hum along to it, and not know why. They even won a Grammy for Best New Artist, on the strength (well, sales strength, likely) of their debut album, Girl You Know It’s True.

The ironic thing is there wasn’t much true about Milli Vanilli. The band was fabricated by the producers. They hired session artists—the not-so-famous professional artists you hire to play what your band members can't—to play their tunes. Then they hired models Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus to be the frontmen; to look pretty on the cover, to make public appearances, to dance and lip-sync in the videos and concerts. Functionally this makes them no different than The Archies or The Chipmunks, but with live-action guys instead of cartoon characters.

How to draw Mr. Squish.

I wanted to be a cartoonist ever since I was a little kid. I began by ripping off Peanuts. Not by drawing Charlie Brown and Snoopy, although I could. I wanted to draw my own characters. But my characters and plotlines were thinly-veiled plagiarism of Peanuts. “Billy” was about a depressed little boy, a sister who dismissed him, an angry little girl down the street who emotionally abused him, a best friend with his own attachment issues, and a dog who escaped all this tension by mentally projecting himself into a complex fantasy world. (Yeesh, just writing that description gives you a glimpse of how thoroughly messed up Charles M. Schulz was.)

But it didn’t matter if I had my own “Billy” characters. Or later, my own “Lester” characters. Other kids wanted me to draw Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and later Garfield and Odie. They didn’t know who my characters were.

Mr. Squish and Greek fraternities.

Before college, all I knew about Greek fraternities was from Animal House, and the fact my dad was in Sigma Nu at San Jose State. (And didn’t talk about it. But that was probably because of all the blackouts. Lots of drinking went on.)

A lot of the college grads I knew from church had gone to Christian schools, which rarely have fraternities; instead they have what they call “Greek-letter societies,” which are basically academic clubs. I later joined one of them, Epsilon Delta Kappa, when I was at Bethany College; I was on its senate for a year, and suffered through some of the longest, most boring meetings ever. Worse than the prayer meetings at a Fundamentalist church. Seriously. But let’s hop off that tangent and go back to 1990.

So when I got to CSU Sacramento, there were the fraternities. Or, as they call themselves, “Greeks"—which, considering their behavior, is nearly as much an insult to ethnic Greeks as "Atlanta Braves” is to Indians. But I digress again. You get the idea, though, that it wasn’t a positive experience.

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.”

Mr. Squish votes for “none of the above.”

Yeah, it’s Friday. Day late. Oh well.

When I started at Sac State, it was 1990, a midterm election year. In California, that means the governor is up for election or re-election. This year, it’s Governor Jerry Brown (D–Oakland), going for his fourth term, thanks to a loophole in the term-limits law which makes him, and George Deukmajian if he wants, the only governors who can run for third and fourth terms. He’s up against Neel Kashkari (R–Laguna Beach). In California’s system, the top two vote-getters in the primary election run against one another in November. The general election seems like kind of a foregone conclusion, considering Brown got 54.3 percent of the vote, and will only get more in the runoff. But you never do know. Brown could always alienate the electorate between now and then. I doubt it; he has won three terms, you know.

Back in 1990 it was then-Senator Pete Wilson (R–San Diego) running against then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein (D–San Francisco). I didn’t care for either of them. As a young knee-jerk conservative, both were too liberal for me. So I drew the above strip.

Mr. Squish and adult beverages.

Thanks to all the horrific examples of alcoholism in my family, like a grandmother who chose to die homeless, a father who can’t remember (or selectively chooses not to remember) half the evil things he did during my childhood, aunts and uncles who ruined their relationships under the influence, and various distant family members whom I have never seen sober—I don’t drink. Don’t and won’t.

I never started. The greatest amount of alcohol I have ever imbibed, at any one time, has come from a communion cup. I don’t have the genes to make it worth the risk. If you’ve ever seen me drinking from a beer bottle, it was either non-alcoholic beer or root beer. If you’ve seen me with a Solo cup, it was soda. At a high school party, I admit I spent the whole evening with an open container; but I never once sipped from it.

Why the subterfuge? Because if you don’t drink, people hate to drink alone, and you must join them. “I don’t drink” isn’t a sufficient excuse. They won’t stop nagging. “Come on, one drink. How’s one drink gonna hurt you? You can’t get drunk from one drink. Just one drink. Just a sip. Just a taste. Come on.” All bloody evening. And I’d hold out all bloody evening, ’cause I’m stubborn like that. The open beer in high school was to get people to lay off.

Mr. Squish and the cola wars.

I grew up with the “cola wars”—the insistence that, if you’re gonna have a cola, it must under all circumstances be a Coca-Cola. (Unless your brand was Pepsi, Tab, RC, or Dr. Pepper. Then that.) Offering you an alternative cola was unacceptable: If your server said, “We don’t have Coke; how about a Pepsi?” you were to have anything but Pepsi. Pepsi, despite tasting largely the same, was foul, noxious swill. Only Coke would do.

One of my aunts collected Coca-Cola memorabilia, and I think she was even a shareholder in the company. Whenever we had family functions, she simply had to have Coke. (One of my other aunts for a time simply had to have coke—with the lowercase c. But that’s another story for another time.)

The cola wars were of course invented by the cola companies. As is any brand-name loyalty campaign. For most of us it makes absolutely no difference whether you buy a Chevy or a Ford, an Apple or a Dell, coffee from Starbucks or from Peet’s, raisin bran manufactured by Kellogg or Post. Same with cola. Nut-flavored fizzy water largely tastes the same, and though I admit a preference for Dr. Pepper, I have no trouble with Coke or Pepsi instead. (I would still prefer an iced coffee if available.) But if you’ve been properly brainwashed by the cola companies, give someone a Pepsi instead of a Coke, and they’ll slit your face. Or, more commonly, angrily react, then lower your tip.

Mr. Squish goes to Burger King.

Summer 1990, the summer before I started at CSU Sacramento, I was still working at Black Culture Magazine, but we hadn’t produced an issue in months. I was short on cash, and school was starting. Burger King had a regular help-wanted ad in the Reporter, so I went to Burger King and they hired me immediately.

At the time it was the only BK in Vacaville. It’s the one on Monte Vista Ave., atop “Hamburger Hill,” with McDonald’s next door, Wendy’s and Rax (now Arby’s) and Long John Silver’s (now gone) across the street. Vacaville was still small, and largely undeveloped, and the bus system sucked. (And still does.) I didn’t drive, so it meant pedaling my bicycle over unlit, poorly-paved strips of asphalt in the middle of nowhere (all of which was developed into Factory Outlets and strip malls in the ’90s), at 4:30 a.m., to open BK for breakfast at 5.

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.

Defective Mr. Squish products.

In which Leonard gets in trouble for selling crap.
(Mr. Squish, CSU Sacramento Hornet, March 1991.)

This is the first appearance of the glass-filled Mr. Squish plush toy. I actually wanted to manufacture them, you know: Cheap fuzzy dolls that would make a tinkling sound whenever you moved them, because they were stuffed with a combination of ceiling insulation and shards of safety glass from busted windshields. (I drew the glass a lot more jagged in panel 3.) I didn’t just want to joke about Mr. Squish merchandising being made from inferior product. I wanted to take the joke further, deliberately make inferior product, and have people buy it anyway, enjoying the irony of it all.