Category: Rats!

This was exactly what happened when my parents first abandoned dropped me off at Virginia Tech in 1987. Mom and Dad helped me get everything unpacked and into my room and then they turned me over to this crazed bunch of psychopaths that I was pretty sure had every intention of killing me slowly via that form of torture known as the push-up. And yeah, I was pretty scared about that.

This was not the first time away from home for me. I’d been to various summer camps and had even spent six weeks in Ireland as part of a study abroad program when I was sixteen. This was, however, the first time I’d been left in a situation I did not want to be in. Camp? Sure, I could do that. Ireland? I jumped at the chance. Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets? Hells no, I did not want to join that freaky outfit!

Except that I did, because back then I could not argue with my Dad and win. He was determined that I take ROTC at whatever school I went to. Little did I know that Virginia Tech had this mini-military academy stuck in the middle of the student body, and that I could not, COULD NOT, take ROTC without joining said mini-military academy. Oh, was my Dad overjoyed to hear this! Oh, did I so want to be run over by a bus before the start of my first semester of school.

But that didn’t happen and so away I went to Tech, where my parents and I were pleasantly greeted by a group of smiling, friendly upper class-men. And you better believe the nice act stopped the moment my mom and dad got into the car and drove away.

Again, my life back then was painfully funny. Emphasis on the painful part.

What’s painful now though is to look at the original cartoons. For the life of me, I have no frikkin’ clue why the Collegiate Times ran these damn things. They must have been desperate for content is all I can think of. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up both this week’s and last week’s cartoons – adding proper borders, erasing stray marks, redoing the text on the computer, etc. Here’s what the original cartoon looks like…

Pretty scary, huh? I knew so little about drawing comic strips, it never even occurred to me to draw borders all the way around each panel. I just did those little crossbars things and left it at that. Duh. As for the lettering? Well, this comic strip was drawn so long ago, we didn’t have scanners to get the artwork into the computer, so adding the lettering in a graphics program would have been a moot point.

Regardless of how badly I drew these first cartoons, the CT ran them, for which I am forever grateful. Now more than 20 years later, I get to clean them up and run them again. I hope you enjoy.

A long time ago (back in 1989, to be exact), in a galaxy far, far away (Blacksburg, Virginia), there was a 20-year-old college student who had nothing better to do with her time than sit and draw cartoons about the Virginia Tech Cadet Corps, of which she was a member.

No, I’m not kidding, I was actually a cadet in college. I wore a uniform everyday, had room inspections and PT, and I even had an Army ROTC scholarship.

I was a lousy cadet, which should surprise no one. Back then, I had yet to develop a passion for fitness, so all the running and push ups and hauling around of 50 lbs of equipment on my back was pretty much my own personal version of Hell. And you just know I had problems with authority. Plus I had no prior experience with the military, in spite of the fact that my dad was career Army (every time he discussed work, yours truly pretty much tuned out). That meant I was completely clueless about things like saluting and marching and singing jodies, etc. Yet in spite of all that, I somehow made it through four years of ROTC and the Cadet Corps, which was like being in a military academy tucked inside the civilian student body (probably somewhere around where the gall bladder would be… get it? Tucked inside the student body, near the gall bladder… oh never mind).

The four years I spent at Virginia Tech were some of the most exhausting, frustrating, and painful times of my life. And yet they were also hysterically funny. After two years in the Corps, I started drawing cartoons about what it was like to be a rat; that is, a freshman cadet. No matter how much I advanced through college and the Corps, I always felt like a rat — confused, hopelessly lost, distracted, and frazzled. Not much has changed since those days, really.

I drew four years worth of Rats! for the Virginia Tech Collegiate Times. That was two strips a week for nine months of the year. Last weekend, I dug through my closet and found all my old strips. Some are in pretty bad condition and need serious restoration. Most are just fine, though. None of these have ever been published anywhere but in the CT, and then not since 1993, the year I finally stopped drawing Rats! and got married and moved on with my life.

I hope you enjoy Rats! You’ll be seeing it here every Thursday until I run through all the original strips. I figure that should take three years. I’ll be running the cartoons in chronological order, so what happens in the strip probably won’t match up with what’s going on the real world (i.e. strips drawn for Christmas or Spring Break will appear when they turn up in the order they were drawn, and not necessarily at Christmas or Spring Break). So sit back and enjoy. You’re about to get a sneak peek at four of the wildest years of my life.