Category: Rats!

Click on the image above to see the full-size version.

Wow, does this cartoon show my age. When I was a cadet, CDs were still very much a new technology. Very, very new. If you bought new music, you didn’t get it off of iTunes or buy MP3s from Amazon. You went to the record store and bought either the vinyl album or a cassette tape. I had 3 small boxes of cassette tapes and a whole slew of vinyl albums when I was a cadet. I didn’t have enough room in my dorm room for the albums and the record player, though, so I just brought a boom box and my cassettes. And I could only listen to the cassettes in my boom box because my car did not have a radio or a cassette player!!

Sounds pretty primitive, doesn’t it? These days, I have an iPod Nano that I can wear on my wrist like a wrist watch. I’ve got a converter that will allow me to plug it into my car stereo. I can play streaming radio from any station in the world on my iPad, and I usually buy my music from iTunes or Amazon. And all these devices are so tiny, so transportable! I can only imagine what it must be like to be a cadet today with all this technology available. Tell me, Rats of the VTCC today, does the Corps even bother to restrict your use of your iPods, your iPads, your Nooks, your Kindles, etc.? Do you have to earn the privilege to listen to your music? Because these days, the device you use to play your music on might also be the same device you read your text books on! And nobody could have even conceived of that when I was a freshman at Virginia Tech. In fact, my freshman year at Virginia Tech was the first year students in engineering were required to have computers. Not all students, mind you, just the engineering students.

My, how far we’ve come. And yet these days, I still prefer to draw my comics on bristol board with a brush pen. Unless I’m on the road, and then you know I use the iPad. Because, hey, technology works!

Being a new leader in charge of a large group of people is never fun. I was always a bit nervous when someone put me in charge of a group of cadets, and later a group of soldiers. Seriously, you think I knew what I was doing? Not at the age of 19, but I guess the point was to learn by doing.

Actually, one of the scariest moments of my military career was when I showed up for my first drill weekend with my first Reserves unit. After meeting the company commander, he called in a gentleman he introduced as my platoon sergeant. The moment my company commander left, the sergeant turned to me and said, “Okay Lieutenant, what are we doing today?” And all I could think of was, “Geeze! This guy is old enough to be my dad! And I’m supposed to give orders to him?!”

It got easier over time. I got used to being in charge and being the one who had to make the final decision and take responsibility for how things turned out (especially if they went badly). I even discovered that there were plenty of people out there older than me who did not know how to do their jobs and they actually needed me to show them. That was perhaps even more frightening than dealing with a platoon sergeant who turned out to be worth his weight in gold (the man was a professional and very good at his job – i.e. he never let me screw things up too badly).

But in the very beginning, when it was just me, a sophomore cadet, trying to lead a march a bunch of rats to the dining hall, it wasn’t so easy, nor was it a lot of fun. To all you new sophomore cadets out there, take it one step at a time. And if you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, you have my sympathies.

Oy! It’s been two months since I last posted a “Rats!” cartoon. My apologies folks, but my schedule keeps getting overwhelmed with things like the kids going back to school, the start of Girl Scout activities for the year, PTA meetings, hurricanes, work, and other stuff. I’m trying to figure out how to stuff more hours in the day, but so far I haven’t succeeded.

Anyway, picking up where we left off in August, Super Rat is here to save the day! Hmmm… Maybe I can get him to do some work for me, or add a few more hours to my day.

I wish.

I told you the Rangers were out to get me. I ended up drawing this a week later, after hearing there had been discussions about stuffing me into my sleeping bag, zipping it closed, and tossing the whole she-bang into the duck-pond. You can see how sorry I was to have offended the ROTC Ranger company. Not.

What amazes me is that the Rangers even cared what my little cartoon said. I did not poke fun at them so much as I was poking fun at that particular character, Irwin, and yet they took it rather personally. Why? Is a college newspaper cartoonist really that big a threat to a bunch of big burly guys in uniform who can scale walls using just their fingers and toes and can open canned goods with their bare teeth? I mean, come on! These guys were tough. They ate MREs all the time, for Pete’s sake.

And yet I had apparently stepped on my toes with my little twice-a-week, ran-only-in-the-college-newspaper, measly little comic strip. All of which goes to show the Army ROTC department really needed to issue those guys a sense of humor along with their M-16s.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I almost got lynched for the above cartoon and a few that followed it. You see, we had a group of rough and ready guys in the ROTC Rangers at Virginia Tech who took a little exception to me making jokes of any sort about them. I never heard anything about it until some months later, but at the time these guys were apparently discussing stuffing me in a sleeping bag, zipping it closed over me head, and then beating me silly with whiffle bats before dumping me in the campus duck pond.

But they were actually a good bunch of guys, and apparently they were able to resist the urge to do all of that to me.

One of my most frequent memories of the cadet dorms is of people walking around in boxer shorts. Not just the guys, but the women too. I drew Irwin in stripy boxer shorts above, because that was such common dress for cadets when they weren’t in uniform. Honestly, it made sense. We had to wear these clean, neatly pressed uniforms to class and they weren’t very comfortable, so obviously when we came back to the dorm, we all got changed. But why bother changing into another outfit when you knew you had to put the uniform back on again a couple hours later for another class or evening formation? So we just all walked around in boxers and t-shirts most of the time.

Funny the things I remember when looking back at these cartoons.

Been a few weeks since I posted one of these. My apologies, folks. Things have been crazy around here. Or crazier than usual, I should say. I’m trying to clear out all the extraneous stuff from my schedule, but with the kids off from school for the summer, I’m still juggling to get stuff done.

Anyhoo, the world’s shortest upperclassman was at one time a member of the Highty-Tighties’ flag corps, or so I recall. Was she any good at it? Well, she only hit herself in the head a few times, and she survived that, so I guess she was good enough 😉

Do the Highty-Tighties still have a flag corps? It was new I think when I was at Virginia Tech. Don’t know if they still have one now. Anyway, here’s the cartoon and I’ll do my best to keep up with things from now on. Enjoy your summer!

I gave my college roommate so much grief about being short. I just went through the cartoons for the next few weeks and there is at least one more about her being short. If you’re short and offended by these cartoons, all I can say is…

Um, my roommate was really, really short!

You’ve probably noticed I’m not posting a lot this week, either here or at VeryScaryArt.com. That’s because I’m scrambling to get ready for Balticon this weekend. I’ll be doing 4-5 panels, including some readings, at the convention. If you go, be sure to look for the crazy chick with red and blue hair and horns. That will be me. I hope to resume regular blog posting… uh, sometime next week. But for now, I gotta get packing!