Commentary

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In order to try to become more of a "real" cartoonist, I started inking Lisa's World with a Rapidograph fountain pen. It was a pain to fill and clean the ink chamber, and the ink tended to bleed when I used it on cheap paper. Still, I managed to ink two comics with the Rapidograph before giving up and switching to felt-tip pens.

Unlike most of the "true story" comics in this series, this happened not to me but to someone else--my friend Chris Leher, who's credited in the last panel of the comic. Chris is also the guy with the hat in the 10-23-97 comic.

In case it wasn't clear, Lisa is picking the pepperonis off of her pizza. (I still do this sometimes. I'm no longer a vegetarian, but I can't stand pepperoni.)

This comic was never published in the Argonaut. Due to a reorganization, the humor page was eliminated from the paper, and Lisa's World was eliminated along with it. I didn't find out about this until the day the paper came out, and I was none too pleased about it. That weekend I posted a scathing editorial about the incident on my website...an action which would come back to bite me later on.

During the fall semester of my junior year, I was asked to start drawing comics for the paper again. This time, instead of typing paper, I opted to use 9x12 drawing paper, which took ink much better and allowed me to try some different layout techniques. Hence, this strip.

That last panel is meant to be a bird's-eye view of the cafeteria, with various students leaving the line for food. I'd like to say this was one of the arty touches I was beginning to apply to the strip, but the truth is I just didn't feel like drawing a bunch of people standing in line.

This is only a slight exaggeration of a really crappy day I had, and my actual horoscope for that day. Since I didn't have a scanner at the time, I ended up retyping the horoscope in a word processor, printing it out, and pasting it onto the page.

That's Macavity, the younger of our family's two cats, in the corner there.

No, this never actually happened. I'm a literature geek, but not *that* much of a literature geek.

A little explanation may be in order here: Over the course of the year, each homeroom class would raise money for an end-of-the-year party. One fundraising event was "spirit links," in which students would buy strips of paper for ten cents each and staple them together to form a paper chain. There were prizes for the class with the longest chain...I can't remember what they were, but we spent a LOT of class time putting that chain together.