Let's go back to high school, my days at Lake Catholic. I did the comic strip for the school paper. It was an odd gig for me at the time. The paper came out every couple of months, so it was more a magazine than a newspaper. I was a Bloom County fan, as mentioned before, and deep down wanted to do a four panel strip with recurring characters. Unfortunately, the schedule didn't let you build anything like that. So, I had to do a straight-up gag strip.
I sed to say that it'd take me one month, twenty-nine days and 22 hours to write the strip, and two hours to draw it.
The name of the strip was "Schooltones". Lake Catholic, you see, didn't have bells, it had tones. A high b-flat if I remember right. So, instead of School Bells it was SchoolTones. Man, was 14 year old me clever!
The problem was, at the time, I wasn't funny at all. I hadn't taken John Troy's humor class at Kubert, which taught me the important lesson of lower your standards. I wanted to do laugh-out-loud classic comics, and I wasn't good enough. But if I just tried for a smile instead, I could learn and build to something better.
Occasionally, I did a good one. I leave it up to you whether this one was one of those. Here, in the height of the 1988 political season and Halloween, I took a pretty obvious shot at Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle, the Rosetta Stone of comedy at the time.
In the background is someone dressed as Dr. Crusher, because I always tried to throw some hidden Star Trek reference in my strips. You'll also notice my old signature, a Klingon"R" lookin' thing that was my attempt at a TZ. My family had a couple artists in it, and there was a family signature. In my youthful quest for indivduality, I tried to carve my own out, but I was never satisfied with it. Eventually, I went to the familar family sig, and I'm very happy and proud that I did.