The Museum

This is a book I made my friend Di back in sophomore year (spring 98) for her birthday. I'll make notes and comments after each page—think of it as my version of the Onion's Commentary Track of the Damned.

So far so good. Sorry for the B&W scan, I guess I'm just lazy. 2.0 liked Ron's Super Soaker. As he doesn't ever have a Super Soaker in the course of the strip, I have no idea why I felt the need to give him one on the cover. Also, Pete has his seminal Tool shirt on. Pete's appearance is based very much on my collitch roommate Eric. Ron's appearance, contrary to popular opinion, is not based on mine. Well, I guess it could be now that he's got an unruly shag for a haircut, complete with sideburns, but it didn't start that way. You see, I don't consider myself blonde. I think I have brown hair. I am told frequently, sometimes by no less a source than 2.0 herself, that I am blonde. I don't get it.

The top row is actually a redo of one of the strips that ran in the Observer. Lissa's haircut is in fact new, relatively speaking. Rough start, here, it gets better, I promise.

You'll note that I make frequent exhortations to the viewer to ignore my crappy drawings. That's what you get for drawing in a bound book, with pen, not bothering to lay down pencils first. Again, it can't be stressed enough—I am lazy.

You had to take a whole year of philosophy at Notre Dame. I hated that. Eric had to hear about it a lot. Oh, the figure standing behind Pete is No Jeans! man. I'll explain him later - for now, all you need to know is it's a cardboard cutout of a Korean military officer.

The business school and collitch of Arts and Letters at ND had a feud regarding who had it easier. Business majors said Arts and Letters did, we begged to differ. Anything where you're constantly working in groups has got to be easier than figuring out what the fuck Milton was talking about. Also, the introduction of Lenny. Back in '96, when we were freshman, Eric and I would stay up pretty late from time to time exploring the internet. The internet, in those days, was pretty much ESPN's web site and porn. Every once in a while, we would find an actual site, though, and one time I found a bizarre little site about chupacabras. Sadly, that site is no longer with us. Looking back, that was probably my first good hint that the internet was not going to be an incredible boon to mankind, allowing for the sharing of information around the globe at the speed of light, but instead, a harbor for all sorts of weirdos, sick fucks, and people who write shit like OMGWTFLOL!!!1!! As for chupacabras, I have been intrigued by them ever since.

I really like the last strip. At the time, the dining hall I went to at ND was being remodeled, and there was no kitchen. So all the food would come across campus from North Dining Hall. About the only thing that survived the trip were the chicken patties. I ate so many chicken patties that semester, it hurts to think about.

Di had a crush on this goofy-looking b-baller named Hans Rasmussen. And how about that dopey design to fill dead space? Wow!

Obviously, Larry should be saying "This is not so good." Also, Lissa's reference to Pete being dead at 2:05 has to do with Notre Dame's parietal system. I don't know where they got the word "parietal" from, but at 12:00 on weekdays and 2:00 on weekends, it means all members of the opposite sex had to leave the dorms. Notre Dame had all single-sex dorms, and you got in a shitload of trouble if you got caught with a lady or a dude after-hours. I'm not making any of this up. Anyway, the point is that the dance Lissa's at would end at precisely 2:00 AM. Oh, and Notre Dame had a ton of dances. My roommate Sweaty went to 51, the record as far as I know. You would generally get set up for these dances, because inter-gender relations at Notre Dame blow ass. Thanks largely, I have to imagine, to the policy of single-sex dorms and parietals.

Not much to say here.

The middle strip kills me.

There was a basketball tourney at ND every spring, called Bookstore Basketball, or, more often, simply Bookstore. There was also a very mysterious building on campus called "The Radiation Building." I don't know anyone who's ever been in there, but I'm sure it's why the squirrels on campus were so tremendously large. So, obviously, there are mutant squirrels on the boys' Bookstore team.

Coach MacLeod was awfully bad. Sorry for the lousy scan on this page.

I can't have a comic set at ND without getting football involved. Ron's number is, of course, double zero. This is before Ruth Riley became the most accomplished athlete at ND in the past ten years, thereby popularizing the double aughts, too. I have no idea why the word 'Notre' is above the numbers, though.

Could I say 'worried' more in the first strip? The QB my first two years at ND was named Ron Powlus. He was OK, but came in to a lot of hype, none of which he ever fulfilled. Eric hated him. I have no idea why I'm so fasinated with the crab thing from the middle strip, but I know that I've actually sketched that in three completely different incarnations: a strip I did back in sixth grade called Big Mac, some doodles in my sketchpad during high school when I was just drawing comic strips of me and my friends, and again here. Seriously, no explanation of why I think that's funny.

This is where the book gets rollickin'. SYR stands for "Screw Your Roommate," i.e., set him up with a lousy date. That's what the dances that took place in the dorm were called. Generally, you'd get a date, she'd wear a black dress, you would wear khakis and a blazer, and you would get loaded in your room and hope to make out later on. Oh, the Dog Book referenced in the second strip was a book with pictures of your freshman class in it. Many an evening did we pass, freshman year, flipping through that thing and ruthlessly mocking all the unfortunates with goofy pictures. I'd scan you some pages, but I've lost since lost my Dog Book. I had the one for the class below me, but they must've realized making everyone list their interests was cruel, because it had been excised. Maybe Sweaty or somebody still has the one from our year, I'll have to see.

Of course Kenny makes an appearance. I wrote this shortly after South Park made its debut, so this wasn't as lame as it now appears to be. I mean, it's still kinda lame, just not really lame.

The Radiation Building! Again! The Wake that Ron references was Alumni Hall's big event (Alumni was my dorm). We would "honor" someone who had died in the previous year by decorating the whole section in that theme. Freshman year, we did Notorious B.I.G. and the next section over did Tupac. Sophomore year, the moron freshmen that my buddies lived near did Weekend at Bernie's because they wanted a Hawaiian theme, junior year was the masterpiece—we did Kosovo, and earned a trip to hell. Senior year, we did Roy Rogers. The highlight of the Wake was my weirdo rector (the priest who ran the dorm)(every male dorm had a priest living in it, Alumni actually had four) popping out of a coffin at midnight and delivering this weird speech. Father George Rozum, C.S.C., was a strange, strange, strange man.

The Dome, in case you don't know, is the Golden Dome and it has Mary, Mother of God, on it. Ron is quoting the alma mater in the top row. Middle row, Q-dogs were these hot dogs that the student center would sell for a quarter after midnight—there would always be a line forming at five of. And Monk is the (soon-to-be-ex) president of Notre Dame. I think he's a tool. P. O'Hara, the name on the door in the last panel, is Patty O'Hara, who was the head of discipline at the time. She had a reputation for being quite the battle axe. I have a picture of me with my arm around her, from the freshman year Wake, in which I am absolutely fucking wasted.

Another aside: Junior year, I took a 300-level fiction writing class with Prof. Matt Benedict. Benedict rocked, I loved that guy. Anyway, my first 20-page story was due to be written and I was more or less bereft of ideas. So I made a little novelization out of the preceding story arc, with Kenny and Ridalin and everything. It worked OK, but was solid proof that the adventures of Ron and Pete were meant to be told in illustrated format. But, there was this dude in the class, Wes. Wes wore black all the time and an ankh medallion. I think he wanted to be goth but didn't have the guts to go through with it. Anyway, this kid would savage everyone's stories in class discussion. And not in a constructive way. He was really annoying. So, we're doing mine, and everyone loved my story (to be fair—if immodest—we only had about three good writers in the class, and I was the first of the three to go, so everyone was happy to get away from reading crap), and Wes finally pipes up. "The word that comes to mind, is spectacle." Um, my story involved mutant turtles fighting a giant Zombie Kenny. I'm not writing fucking Hemingway, here. Benedict came to my defense, not that I really needed it from this kid, with a zany Caddyshack reference.

When Wes finally had to write a story, I was fully expecting to be blown away by this modern Master of Letters who was no doubt in our midst.

He wrote a story about a Midwestern town being attacked by zombies. And not in an allegorical original Dawn of the Dead way. Or in a good re-make Dawn of the Dead way. Kind of in a shitty way.

The moral of the story? I didn't like that Wes kid.

Carroll Hall was built on the far side of one of the lakes on campus. I have no idea why they insist on exiling people out there to this day. It takes like half an hour to get there from the main classroom buildings. You can fully expect to see the Mentos joke recycled.

DART was the class-registry system at ND, an abusive automated phone service that everyone hated.

Security at ND was airtight when students tried getting cars on campus, but after USC came to the Stadium one year, they somehow missed about 50 cars getting vandalized in one of the on-campus parking lots.

I don't know why the Observer always had some weird Alaskan fishing boat job listed at the end of the year, but it was obviously perfect for Ron.

Wow, that top joke sucked. Anyway, in the further adventures of the Lilypad (which were never actually written), Ron never comes back to campus following his summer at sea, and Pete eventually has to go find him so that he can get his half of the rent. Ron winds up having been trapped in the Bermuda Triangle for several months, which is not as interesting as you might think.