Believe it or not, I started Making the Grades as a way to shut my friends up ... well, one friend in particular (sadly I no longer remember which friend it was, or I'd embarrass her here in front of the whole world wide web). It was in 1986 during what was supposed to be my final year at SUNY-B (the State University of New York campus at Binghamton, which has since wisely changed its name to Binghamton University)—I wound up taking the 5-year plan, though. The campus paper's weekly cartoon page had hit an all time low ... or at least "all time" for the four years we had experienced ... and my friend was desperate for something funny to read every Thursday. She begged, wheedled and cajoled me to no end. Then she switched tactics."I know why you won't do a cartoon for the Pipe Dream," she said to me while reading the student paper one September afternoon. "You're a really good artist, you're just not a good enough writer to pull it off. I bet you tried, and found that your cartoons weren't even as funny as these. It's nothing to be ashamed of really."
She was pointing to a particularly un-funny strip about frat boys doing something distasteful .... and boy did I take that bait.
Of course, it didn't last long. I did a few strips that proved I could do it and be funnier than anything else the Pipe Dream had seen during my days at SUNY-B ... but once I proved my point I lost interest and Making the Grades went into hybernation for about a year.
The next spring I had the first really traumatic break-up of my life. Oh, it wasn't ugly or mean or spiteful (in fact Judy and I are still very good friends to this day), but it was painful at the time. I've never been very much for auto-biographical writing, but somehow my experience begged to be captured in cartoon form. These comics were never published anywhere, but they did make me realize the potential for serious writing using the comic strip medium. And when I moved back to Binghamton about eight months after my graduation, I decided to do what I never would during my student years—commit to writing a regular strip for the Pipe Dream.
Making the Grades ran more or less weekly throughout the 1988-89 school year, and I actually gained some notoriety because of it. I was no longer a student, but I was a personality on campus. My comics were hung on various dorm room and faculty office doors. I got recognized when I went to parties. And I even had one of my strips picked up by a national college paper review. It even led to a really crappy-paying gig as a cartoonist for a local paper (a more family oriented strip called The New Neighbors).
Over the years I've received kudos for this series from friends and even professional cartoonists. An acquaintance of my family, who worked for years drawing Archie comics, went so far to suggest that I could transform Making the Grades into "the male version of Cathy" (this was a much bigger compliment at the time as Cathy was still funny, insightful, and wildly popular). But this was when I learned that lesson I mentioned elsewhere about work. I didn't want to do a comic strip ... it was too much work ... it wasn't fun and easy. Writing a weekly strip had been painful at times. I couldn't imagine doing a daily one! In the intervening years I have only occasionally regretted that decision ... and never for very long.
So Making the Grades was put to bed once and for all. Though I toyed with the idea of reincarnating is as English In Action, a strip about being an English teacher in Japan, that project never really got off the ground But now you can relive those glory days with me. Take a step back to life on and around the campus of SUNY-Binghamton circa 1988. Oh, and as an "added bonus" (in other words, something relatively useless that I wanted to do anyway), I've annoted some of the strips to let you know what was going on in my head when I penned them.
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