This Happens -- Page One

by Craig J. Clark & Elena La Rocca
This Happens is a comic strip that I wrote and Elena drew a long, long time ago. It was published in The Signal, the student newspaper of Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey), from September 22, 1992, to December 7, 1993. Not a terribly long run -- only 30 strips in all -- but I'm still proud of it. (Otherwise I wouldn't be posting it here on my site.)

I was inspired to start a comic my freshman year by the two excellent strips that were in the paper at the time -- Absurd Notions by Kevin Pease and Random Occurrences by Joe Bakter (which unfortunately does not have a web presence). Both were intelligently-written and well-drawn. I couldn't draw, so I aspired to at least write as intelligently as they did. Unfortunately, it wasn't until my sophomore year that the features editor put me in touch with Elena La Rocca -- an artist who didn't have time to write -- and she filled in the missing part of the equation.

Well, enough backstory. On with the strips! (And for those of you who didn't attend TSC for that year and a half, I'm taking a page out of Kevin Pease's book and providing annotations for them. Some of them need them more than others, as you will see...) Oh, yes. And for those of you joining us from Zwol, welcome!

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This was our premiere strip and right off the bat I tried to court controversy. For those of you who cannot "look it up" as the footnote in the first frame tells you to do, "F.Y.E." stands for First Year Experience. This was a program that the administration started that year wherein they housed a number of first year students on four freshman-only floors in two adjoining residence halls. The idea was that these guinea pigs would all live together, all take the same classes together and all socialize together, to the exclusion of doing any of these things with anybody else. Hence, this strip (and its follow-up).

Incidentally, for those of you who are straining to read the words at the bottom of the three middle frames, they say, respectively, "obviously, a non-alcoholic beverage," "still non-alcoholic" and "Nope. Hasn't changed yet." You have to have upperclassmen living on your floor in order to have a wet party.

First published September 29, 1992

Oh, yes. And for some reason all First Year Experiencers had to start out as Open Options majors, even if they had previously specified a major. Damn silly if you ask me. Of course, one could say the same about these strips. Basically what I did was take a six-panel strip and break it up over two weeks with an intro and outro panel for each part. This obviously didn't have the effect I was intending because the following year the administration put all of their freshmen in the same two dorms, hailing the F.Y.E. program as a great success. Whatever.

Anyway, remember when I said I was courting controversy? Well, after this strip appeared Elena and I heard that somebody who lived on the 3rd floor of Travers Hall was going to write a letter to The Signal about these strips, claiming that we had it all wrong and that it was a great place to live, take classes and socialize, etc. Sadly, the letter never appeared, so we turned to less overtly political humor.

For the squinters, the tiny print in the second panel reads "Remember last week? Still no alcohol." This wouldn't the last time I would recycle this joke.

Trivia Note #1: Elena actually designed the T-shirts that our two First Year Experiencers are wearing in these and other strips. Wacky.

Trivia Note #2: Eagle-eyed readers will have no doubt noticed that the name of this particular strip is "Tish Happens." The reasons for this will soon become apparent.

Trivia Note #3: There is no Trivia Note #3. But there is a strip #3:

First published October 13, 1992

This is the strip that actually introduced our two main characters, Roger and John. I won't tell you much about them right now -- I'll let you find out about them as the strip progresses (much as I did).

You will notice that I have yet to break free of the intro panel/three panel strip/outro panel format. That will happen presently. You will also notice that the title of the strip has changed...again. Fans of anagrams will be able to tell what the real name of the comic was always intended to be. For the first two semesters of its existence, the title of the strip changed from week to week. Sometimes the title had something to do with the content, but most times it did not. I'll leave it to you to figure out just what I was on when I came up with most of them. (And no, I never did a Star Wars-related strip entitled "Sith Happen.")

Incidentally, the Decker that Roger refers to is the same dining hall referenced in this Absurd Notions Classic and featured in others. It's a small world, people. Deal with it.

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