Oh boy. What to say about this one? This strip was one of the ‘summertime’ strips that appeared in the infrequent monthly summer issues of the Silhouette. (I always tried to keep the strips vaguely seasonal, and I thought there was nothing more fitting for a campus comic in the summer than to show the horror of being stuck in class on a beautiful day.)
There’s lots of interesting stuff here. First off, the Gothic tower that’s in the background of the first panel is an actual building on McMaster campus called University Hall. Check it out! McMaster’s one of the oldest universities in Canada; it has a lot of beautiful ‘ivy league’ architecture. It also has lots of newer, uglier buildings, but I avoided featuring them in my comic. (Those who look closely will notice that University Hall actually transforms into a NASA rocket in the last panel. I guess that’s where the spaceman came from.)
I have NO IDEA what I was thinking about when I drew those last three panels. I wanted them to get progressively screwier with each panel, and I think I succeeded. Note the weird tank bear in panel four. That was inspired by a joke character called ‘Tank Rupert’ that I used to draw for a friend’s seven year-old daughter. She would ask me to draw Rupert Bear, and I would gladly oblige, but I’d give him tank treads from the waist down. She would scream at me for ruining the drawing, and the game was complete.
In retrospect, the weirdest feature has to be the weird, walleyed, armless dude with the big nose and the man-boobs at the bottom of the frame.
Oh, and the lecture that Puck is listening to? That was, indeed, lifted from a real lecture in a second year modern British literature class.
Seriously.
Puck IS the trip! 🙂
I appreciate you rising to the challenge of posting a comment to this lonely page. Well done.
Context! It’s Canadian! Where else would human students go to university with anchient spirits of yore! None of the spirits could afford American institution.
True. American universities are prohibitive even for demigods.
@EG, thank you for your kind response to my previous post on this page. Also, I’m glad to see Puck has a lively imagination. It’s a sign of intelligence I believe.
I do really appreciate the people who bother to post on old comics. Makes the site look more lived in!