Sunday Funnies. Pen and ink. Unpublished.
This cartoon was my homage to four comic strips that I grew up reading — Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Chic Young’s Blondie, Marvel’s The Amazing Spiderman, and Gary Larson’s The Far Side.
The strips themselves need no further introduction, but a little primer on the inside jokes:
Mental Health = One of the primary campaign topics of the Office of Health Education (more so than Sleep)
Smokes = Smokey Joe’s, the go-to pub on campus
BBB = Biological Basis of Behavior, the major for pre-med students
Squirrels = Ubiquitous animals on campus that were so accustomed to human presence that they would show up on our lunch tables, in our trash bins, and even inside our apartments to terrorize the residents (true story)
Smoking = Not allowed inside, so there were always students (mostly European MBAs) lighting up outside Huntsman Hall. The original cartoon can be found here
I chose not to submit this strip in the wake of Napster suing all those students for copyright violation.
I’d actually asked pro bono advice from a lawyer through the Philly Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts hotline as to whether this fell under the “fair use” exception of copyright law. He explained both sides of the argument, but ultimately left it up to me to decide.
I erred on the side of caution back then, but really wish that I’d run it…
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Disclaimer: This artwork is purely for the purpose of parody. All characters are owned by their respective creators and/or syndicates:
Peanuts (Charles Schulz, Universal Uclick)
Blondie (Chic Young, King Features Syndicate)
The Amazing Spiderman (Stan Lee, King Features Syndicate)
The Far Side (Gary Larson, Universal Press Syndicate)