From February to early this month, I embarked on an experiment.
I created a comic strip, from the ground up. Titled "Dorm Room," it follows the adventures of three residents of, well, a dorm room. It's quirky and, hopefully, amusing. With Max adding suggestions and fine-tuning some of the knottier jokes (not to mention adding some punch lines), it's a project I'm proud of.
I'm a cartoonist from way back. From my third-grade to eighth-grade years, I drew some 2,500 pages of comics. I was proud of the count, and the output allowed me to make it through middle school sane. The work also taught me how to draw, how to write, and how to look at the world (absurdly, it turns out).
I started writing more seriously in the eighth grade, and since then I've written a lot in the way of poetry and nonfiction. But I never turned my back on cartooning entirely. I drew editorial cartoons steadily through my college years.
As I spent time with Max, we worked on some art projects. We've planned to put them online for some time, but it involves time and a scanner, both of which we're without for the moment.
For all that, I figured my time working on cartoons proper was over. But then my friend Katie Hollar zapped me an e-mail some four months ago. She was working for a publisher and wanted to see some of my cartoons -- and not sketches, but a proposal for a series.
It took a long time. I knew I wanted to deal with college life, but the angle and character development took time to evolve. The writing of the six strips took several days of brainstorming. And then I spent about a month working on the final drawings. By that time, Katie had left her employer.
But I sent them off anyway. It was a blast.