Welcome to the 100th post at Henchman-4-Hire! It’s only been a few months, but I’m loving this blog. It’s been so much fun sharing all my geeky opinions with everyone. I’m getting fans from all over the Internet, and viewership keeps going up. Tell your friends. Share my entries on Facebook or Twitter. I’d love to see more comments after the posts. Let’s get some discussion going. What are your opinions about the geeky things I write about? It would be really fun if this blog became something of a community for people to talk about geeky topics. And if you have any geeky topics you’d like me to write about, don’t hesitate to e-mail me.

For the 100th post, we’re taking a trip down memory lane to introduce my readers to Falmouth University, the comic strip I wrote and drew for my college newspaper.

I was an amateur cartoonist – emphasis on ‘amateur’ – during my college years at Syracuse University in upstate New York. For all four years, I wrote and drew my own comic strip for the school’s newspaper, The Daily Orange. It was called Falmouth University, and it was about a group of college friends having geeky and silly adventures on the fictional campus. I based the characters on myself and my friends, naming them Jack, Zips, Studhammer and a revolving door of female characters – of which there was a Female Character Curse! I did my best to shy away from obvious jokes about bad cafeteria food and other college cliches, instead going for zany humor. Sometimes I got political, sometimes I teased other comic strips and sometimes I got overly sentimental. Sometimes they were just dumb. I wrote all the jokes myself and hand-drew every strip. By my senior year, it was running every day in the school newspaper, and I know I had fans because I bumped into a few of them around campus.

Falmouth University was likely my greatest achievement in college.

The art was terrible, the jokes were mundane; but darn it, Falmouth University was legit! I loved that little strip and I thought I’d share some of my favorite comics as well as the story of how I dabbled in cartoonery.

The comic is mostly based on people I knew freshmen year. Jack was a slimmer version of me, also without the glasses. (Though in hindsight, I probably should just go with one friend’s suggestion that Jack was more like Graham Mason, a friend who lived a few doors down from me freshman year. The backwards baseball cap and the love of video games definitely fit with Graham.) Zips was based on my freshman roommate Adam Raymer, in that both ran track. And Studhammer was based on two guys I knew, GM Hakim and Dan Levy.

There’s a fun pre-college story where I got to meet these guys and several other people from my floor prior to actually arriving on campus. So we were pals. GM’s freshman nickname was ‘Studwrench’ and I don’t remember where that came from…so I just took it and switched it to ‘Studhammer’ for the comic. The characters are only really loosely based on my friends, though Stuhammer looks sort of like GM, at least.

The name ‘Falmouth University’ comes from my roommate Adam. He once told me an story about his high school track team from Falmouth, Massachusetts. They once went to a college tournament, and in order to get in, they made up the name ‘Falmouth University’ instead of Falmouth High School. The track team then spent the day calling themselves ‘FU’. I decided that was funny enough to make a good comic strip title.

I had several different female characters to round out the quartet, as well as a Residential Assistant and several minor supporting characters. There was the grouchy boss, the professor, the hot co-worker, the dork and Carl. The faceless RA was based on my friend Christy Pachucki, an actual RA in my building who I knew through some other friends.

The Female Character Curse was basically the idea that whenever I picked a female friend to be a character, that girl didn’t stick around either on campus or in life.

The first female character was Heather, based on a girl I knew named Kate Kelly. I had a little crush on her, but I don’t think she ever knew or even knew the character was supposed to be based on her. I don’t even know if she read the comic. We traveled in different circles, so that friendship basically just drifted apart.

Dresses are easier to draw than legs

The second female character was Cait and her pet penguin, based on my friends Caitlin Byrne and Ashley. Caitlin was one of my closer friends freshman and sophomore year, and she really loved Disney, hence the Mickey Mouse ears. She was a member of a sorority, and I used to draw the sorority letters on her sweatshirt, until her sorority sisters got sort of freaked out that Caitlin was a character in a DO comic strip. So she asked me to change the letters. Caitlin was super smart and she graduated after only two years at Syracuse, so her character didn’t stick around either.

You can really see how Jack changed as I drew more and more

The third female character for my Junior year was Bobi, based on Becky Waterman. I’ve known Becky since I was a little kid, and she was a close friend of mine in high school. She was a grade behind me and also went to Syracuse University…for only a year or two. I forget why Becky left, but she did, and so the curse claimed another friend.

I think Bobi has a neat look

The fourth female character was ‘Lyssa, based on my girlfriend and friend-of-the-site Alyssa, whom I met back in college. ‘Lyssa the character also had a bit of Saandra Waterman thrown in; Becky’s older sister who transferred to Syracuse, and who I hung out with Junior and Senior years. Saandra eventually spent a semester abroad (if my memory serves) and Alyssa suffered a tragedy midway through Senior year that took her away. But I kept ‘Lyssa around for the rest of the year as a tribute.

Overalls and glasses are always cute

So that was my cast. I came up with a wide variety of different adventures and gags for them, some taking place on campus, usually in the dorms, and some that were just weird for the fun of it. Most famously, at least as far as I’m concerned, was that I changed the title in the spring of 2003 to Falmouth University at War. That’s when we invaded Iraq, so I had my characters get drafted and sent to the front lines for some war humor. Then the whole ‘Mission Accomplished’ thing happened and I switched back to normal, thinking the war was over. Boy was that premature.

I’d like to think I established different personalities for the character, but probably not. They were a fun little group, and I had a lot of fun making the strip. But they wouldn’t have become anything if it wasn’t for the awesomeness of the student newspaper.

The great thing about The Daily Orange – or ‘The DO’ as it was commonly known – was that it looked and felt like a legitimate newspaper. It was student-owned and student-produced, completely independent from Syracuse University. They used real newsprint, it was folded like a newspaper, had the masthead on top and had real articles about real news by real student reporters. I wrote for The DO for several years, leading to my current career as a professional newspaper reporter. Everybody’s favorite section of The DO, it’s crowning achievement, was the crossword puzzle. Everybody loved doing the puzzle in class!

But The DO also had its own comics page, with more than a dozen comics written and drawn by students. A lot of them were well-drawn, many were more avant garde than actually humorous, and most of them were just weird. One of the actually famous comics from The DO is The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch. Perhaps you’ve seen it online? Hilarious comic. Well PBF debuted in The Daily Orange all those years ago, often running alongside Falmouth University. I was nowhere near as funny as PBF, but I tried, dammit! PBF went on to be published in real newspapers across the Northeast, and Gurewitch hsa become so famous that he’s done strips for Marvel Comics.

Check it out, an actually funny comic strip!

I went back to campus a year or two after graduation and discovered that The DO had changed its style and had become more of a pamphlet than a true newspaper. It was folded differently and had a whole new style to it. There were only two or three comics crammed onto a smaller page too. Very disappointing. But at least for my four years, The DO was a newspaper to be proud of!

Anyway, the story of Falmouth University began the second semester of my freshman year. I’d become a huge fan of The DO and it’s comics, and even knew a guy, Tom, who made one of the comics. Tom hung out in my group of freshmen friends. I forget the name of his comic, and I’m not sure what ever happened to Tom. I think he transferred away after freshman year. I wanted to do a comic too, but there was one problem – I can’t draw. As you’ve seen in the sample strips, the best I can do is doodle. I’ve never taken any drawing classes, so maybe that’s the problem. I just can’t get on the page what I can picture in my mind.

Second semester freshman year, I decided to just go for it. The DO had been running ads that they needed more comics. So I started coming up with ideas. I don’t remember any of my other ideas, but I settled on Falmouth University and the group of friends. Before I could begin drawing them, however, The DO’s ad changed to say they needed only square, one-panel comics. Like the Family Circus. The way the comics page was set up, they had the normal 3-panel strips down the left side of the page, and then a few one-panel square comics crammed underneath the crossword puzzle. So at the last minute, I changed all my gags to fit one-panel humor, drew them up and walked them across camps to The DO office.

They appeared within a week, and soon a very slight phenomenon was born!

The very first Falmouth University

Since I was brand new, my comics didn’t appear all that often. I had maybe one or two a week in the paper. The same comics didn’t run every day anyway, since there were so many submissions. But since I was one of the few square comics, I got featured a lot more often. I kept churning out new comics and walking them over to The DO across campus. I used to type up the captions and print them out, then cut and paste them into the hand-drawn comic. Then I would Xerox the comic and hand-in the copies, while I kept the originals. I’m pretty sure I have the originals stored somewhere at my parents’ house…at least I hope I do.

By Junior year, I’d gotten to know the paper’s Art Director pretty well, and I was starting to get run every day. I also got a scanner for my computer and was able to start using MSPaint to help put the comics together, as well as e-mail them into The DO. I also started my own website: http://www.falmouthuniversity.com. It was a Geocities site, but has since been erased because Geocities closed down.

Now you can find almost all of my Falmouth University comics in an album on my personal Facebook page. Though I think I’m missing at least one whole semester from my Junior year because the way I was storing the computer files ended up erasing them. I think/hope my parents still have the actual physical copies of the newspapers, and someday I’ll try to scan them in for posterity.

Definitely by Senior year I was in the paper every day. I loved writing and drawing that comic. I can remember sitting around and coming up with ideas. I remember discovering new ways to draw and ink the comics. Once I was interviewed on the student television network, though the host was far more interested in my hat hair for some reason. I remember the little mini-feud I had with the Penguins Without Pants sketch comedy team after I lovingly mocked them in one comic. Writing Falmouth University was my favorite part of college. In fact, my greatest regret from college is not that I didn’t party enough, it was that I never pushed my minor celebrity as much as I could. I wish I’d bragged a bit more.

Maybe used the comic to pick up some chicks…

The very last Falmouth University