by Craig J. Clark & Elena La Rocca
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For two years I was a member of Trenton State's Pep Band. (Yes, that's what it says on their shirts. And below the words there's a cute paw print. Maybe Elena designed this shirt, too. Who knows? Anyway...) This meant that I got to attend all home football games, play beer commercial music on my trumpet really loud, and occasionally start cheers when they weren't being started by the cheerleaders. "Hip hip -- Pelvis" is one that I started doing early on and continued to do throughout my tenure with the organization. I only stopped going when the school stopped paying for pizzas at our rehearsals.
This strip was the first of many to inspire confusion in a number of people. First of all, Elena misunderstood the punchline and originally drew Roger as Elvis in the last frame. (She had not yet developed the eerie ability to see directly into my brain and draw whatever she saw there.) Then there was the confused student who came into The Signal office one day and demanded that somebody explain the joke to her. "Well," said one of the staffers on hand, "what do you get when you put two hips together?" "A pelvis," the student immediately replied and understanding dawned. For a time I specialized in delayed-reaction punchlines. Still do, really.
The week after Halloween we put in the first of two Ouija board-centered strips. This strip and its follow-up was actually in the original batch of ideas I submitted to The Signal the previous year. (Another was a concept that was used to much better effect in the college comic Thatch, so I'm really glad I didn't go with it.) We probably should have chosen one or the other to go in the paper, but I was happy to get any strips in, so both were published. If I had to choose one, however, I would go with this strip since it marks the first appearance of our fifth character, a girl who would go unnamed until the following semester.
It isn't too difficult to make out, but to save you the effort John's shirt reads "I hosted a Dane for two weeks... and all I got to eat at the banquet was... some shrimp and a bunch of grass. Oh yeah, and some duck, too." (This, by the way, was the first and last time I have ever eaten duck.) Anyway, my roommate and I actually did host a Danish business student for two weeks that semester. He slept on our floor, used our bathroom and taught us some dirty words in Dansk at the aforementioned banquet. And at the end of it all we got T-shirts. Original, yes?
This is the second of our two Ouija board-centered strips. It is essentially the same joke that was in the last one, but I didn't want expend too much energy writing new strips because at the time we were only showing up in the paper sporadically. Seems the layout editor had the preconception that the "Fun Stuff" page had to include two comics and a puzzle, so if Absurd Notions and Random Occurrences both showed up one week, then This Happens got bumped. This happened more times than I care to think about, but the situation would change (mostly for the better) the following semester.
For those not in the know, that is Harold W. Eickhoff -- then president of the college -- in the third and fifth panels. Originally I had him saying something else in the last panel -- I don't remember precisely what -- but Elena talked me out of it. This probably has something to do with the fact that the original line intimated that Eickhoff was secretly in league with the Prince of Darkness. What can I say? I guess I was still hoping for a letter to the editor.
The final strip of our first semester and seventh overall -- and instead of going back to Roger or John, I decided to give the as-yet unnamed girl (who would eventually be named Sue -- no point in keeping you in suspense) something to do. I was living in Community Commons at the time and the campus health center and psychological services were right next door to one another on the ground floor of the building, so it's possible that this sort of thing actually happened from time to time. Yeah. Riiiiight.
This was the first time I played with comic strip conventions. At the time, having a character run outside of a panel was a brand new idea to me -- and to Elena, too, apparently. We would both get better at this sort of thing as time went on.
BONUS ARTIST COMMENTARY FROM ELENA: "My classmates in my art classes always noticed a certain resemblance between me and Sue -- we did have the same hair and the same shoes; but Sue has blue eyes and mine are green -- so we're easy to tell apart. I liked giving the female characters long hair because it can be expressive -- Sue is running from the doctor and her hair can stream out behind her and add to the motion of the whole thing. 'Sides, it's nice to have some variety in there."
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All images are copyright © 1992, 1993, 2001 by Craig J. Clark & Elena Nazzaro. Text is copyright © 2001 by Craig J. Clark and Elena Nazzaro.
All images are for viewing only and may not be used without permission.