Category: Rats!

Here it is, the last cartoon from the first year of “Rats!” I did some figuring and I guess 50 cartoons was about all I produced a year. Still, it seems like there should have been more.

While it may be summer in Irwin’s world, it’s absolutely freezing where I’m at, and I’m betting it’s even colder up in Blacksburg. The winter of my rat year is the reason why I finally started to grow my hair long. I had kept it very short up unti that point, Annie Lennox short for those of you old enough to understand the reference. But that first winter was bitterly cold. I swear, I thought my ears were going to fall off it was so bad. Not even ear muffs helped keep my head warm.

So I grew out my hair. By the time I graduated from college, it was all the way down to my back. I didn’t cut it short again until a few months after my second child was born. I had to cut it then because post-partum hormones had turned it all into a freakish tumbleweed perched atop my head. But now I’m growing it long again. I think in another two years, it’ll be back down to the middle of my back.

But enough about my hair. How’s yours? Any freshmen cadets out there wishing they had more hair on their heads? Anyone lose an ear to frostbite yet? I’m ghoulishly curious, I know, but I enjoy hearing about the difficulties new cadets go through every year.

Because it reminds me I don’t have to deal with any of that stuff anymore!

Have a good week 😉

Nothing seems stranger, or perhaps sillier, than a freshman about to become a sophomore. It just seems so unreal to watch a rat become an upper classman. And yes, I include myself in this. I felt ridiculous suddenly being an upper classman. I mean come on! Who are we kidding?! I barely survived being a rat, and now people are telling me I’m ready to lord it over other rats?!

Irwin Ratt is probably the best reflection of me there is. Charlie Brown was Charles Schultz, Irwin was me. Everything he went through, I went through. Yes, Irwin is male and I’m female, but still, he was me and I was him. And many days, I still feel like Irwin Ratt, completely unprepared to deal with whatever life throws at me. Ah well, I’ll bungle through it all somehow.

Next week is the last strip drawn for my freshman year. I keep think there should be more, because the Collegiate Times ran twice a week almost every week between September and May. I’ll have to do some math and see. But I can’t find any more cartoons with that year written on them, so I guess that’s that.

Hope everyone at Tech is having fun. I’m swamped with work but struggling through it. I can’t wait until March. Hopefully by then I’ll be able to catch a break. I’ll do my best to keep up with the comics through it all, but if for some reason I skip a week, my apologies. It’s just that real life does tend to interfere.

I am not 100% certain, but I feel like there ought to be another cartoon before this one, finishing up the argument between Kitty and Claw before moving on to poor Irwin Rat. However, it isn’t in the pile of strips I have set aside for the first year, so maybe I’m just mis-remembering things. I’m getting old, so I tend to do that.

Friends do evil things to friends who are hungover. I think that’s a major reason why I never did much drinking in college. My buds were truly evil, and I think they would have seriously messed with me had I ever been hungover. My buds were cool, mind you. Very nice people. But evil, evil people none the less.

I’ve never made this mistake, nor had anyone I was dating make it with me, but the thought of something like this happening struck me as being hysterically funny. Yes, I did make up some stuff for this comic strip. I occasionally do it for my other web comic as well, “The Adventures of Cynical Woman.” What can I say? Sometimes real life is a little boring. But not often.

Very little is boring right now, in fact. That’s because your’s truly signed up to be Cookie Mom for my daughter’s Brownie troop. I may have been an ROTC cadet and an officer in the Army Reserves, but I never had any experience with the Girl Scouts until this year. And boy, has it been an experience. The mom who conned me into being cookie mom said the job was low key. She LIED! I’m up to my assets in paperwork right now, and scrambling to keep up with everything. But I keep telling myself, I dealt with much more difficult tasks in the Army Reserves. Like running weapons qualification ranges. Being cookie mom isn’t nearly as bad as being the OIC for a weapons qualification range, because no one my daughter’s Brownie troop is likely to shoot anybody by accident. I hope.

Have fun this week, and thank you to everyone who’s left comments on the blog or sent me emails. I really do appreciate the feedback. It’s good to know people still want to read these comics even twenty years after they were originally published.

Welcome back from the holidays! I’m guessing all the cadets are still out on break, but the rest of us have returned to our normal schedule. And I’m doing my best to stay on top of getting these cartoons up on time. It’s a bit easier when I don’t have to worry about shopping for presents or cleaning the house before relatives arrive and stay for a week.

So on to this week’s cartoon. Ah, the stupid things people do for love. It’s always fun to point and laugh at some sap who’s so lovesick he’s dopey, but then it happens to you, and it’s not so fun anymore.

Judging by the backdrop, I set this cartoon right front of the cadet dorms. I think that’s the flagpole there, with a plaque commemorating alumni who served and died in WWI. My memory is fuzzy on this though, since I haven’t been to the campus in a while. But I’m pretty sure that’s where this is happening.

Lots of weird stuff used to happen on weekends around the dorms. None of it ever to me though. I was pretty boring back then. Not much has changed over the years.

Hope you all had a good holiday!

Aaaaaawwwww, don’t they make a cute couple?

This story arc has a few more eps before it wraps up. No, I don’t have any clue what’s coming up next. I just know things switch over to something else.

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays – Channukah, Kwanza, Christmas, Bohdi Day (for all you fellow Buddhists out there!). Whatever you celebrate, enjoy it. To all you students out there, take care driving home for the holidays and do not hand your mom all your dirty laundry when you walk in the door. She’ll love you for that, trust me.

Ah, relationship drama. Nothing says love like doing something totally stupid to impress the object of your affection. I’ve done it, you’ve probably done, we’ve all done. But some folks go a little farther than others and that can spell disaster, especially if you land on your head.

Speaking of relationships, today is the 20th anniversary of the first time I kissed my husband. It was during a Christmas party/slam dance at good ol’ Apartment 1 in Blacksburg. This was my senior year at Virginia Tech, and Michael and I had been flirting outrageously for months. A lot of folks probably breathed a sigh of relief when we finally got together, then looked away when we got waaaaaaaaaay too sappy and mushy for anybody’s good. We’re still just as bad 20 years later, I can assure you.

Yes, I’m posting late again today. Blame the holidays and my workload. I am up to my armpits in a novel I’m rewriting, plus I started a new project last week called Very Scary Art. It’s a website devoted to children’s drawings of all things scary and spooky and it’s done in support of DonorsChoose.org. Stop by and take a look!

As for this week’s comic, yes, Irwin is not a rat who can handle his liquor. There are a few more of these strips, then we move on to other subjects. I can’t remember which subjects at the moment, but this party storyline does eventually end. When these cartoons first ran, a lot of folks didn’t like it. They prefered the single gag comics rather than an overarcing story that ran several episodes. All I can say is, I had to come up with two comic strips a week for the Collegiate Times, so I went with what I thought would work. I still think the comics are funny, even if others didn’t care for them. But then I drew them, so what do I know?

I’ve recently been reading Scary Go Round by John Allen, a very fun web comic about a little town called Tackleford in England. It’s a bizarre comic with all sorts of oddities like pretty but troubled women, wendigos, zombies, fish men and evil scientists. John Allen included his comments in each book about what he thought worked and didn’t work, and I was amazed to note that he also had storylines that he thought did not go over well with his fans. I had a hard time imagining it, because I thought each and every page was pure gold.

Cartoonists, like all artists, can be a very self-critical lot. We do the best we can, but we rely on an audience to let us know if we’ve succeeded or not. That’s both great and not so great, but either way, I’d still rather draw cartoons than get paid to work a day job.

Oy! I’m running late today with the cartoon. My apologies. It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve been busy cooking this morning, getting ready to take a few dishes with me to my best friend’s family’s house for dinner this afternoon. But I managed to catch a few spare moments to post today’s comic.

A few notes about this episode. Alcohol and nerves never mix well, in my experience. People go from scared to stupid in one drink. Yeah, yeah, I keep harping on the “don’t drink” message, but honestly, I saw far too many people in my years at Virginia Tech do stupid things because they had too much to drink. It can cost you your scholarship, your military commission, your degree, your life, everything.

So there’s my public service announcement. Now please notice the cockroach and Space Bunny posters in the background. Looking at these, I’m guessing I drew this cartoon around the time Technicon was about to be held. And it looks like it must have been Technicon 7, maybe. Yes, I was a sci-fi nerd and a hard core member of the Virginia Tech Science Fiction and Fantasty Club, better known as VTSFFC. That’s how I met the Hubster, in fact. I got elected club president one year and my girlfriends decided to make him Vice President because we looked so cute together. Honestly, I think we were lousy at running the club, but we have managed to stay happily married for the last 17 years, so there’s that.

Have a happy Thanksgiving! Some time later this weekend, I hope to make a big announcement about a super-secret-special project that I have in the works. I can’t say what it is yet, but whatever it is, it will be VERY SCARY! Stay tuned 😉

Oh, the drama! There was nothing like a torrid romance to liven things up in the cadet dorms. We had many established couples in the VTCC. Some you knew were going to end up married right after graduation, and some you wondered if they’d survive the week or kill each other. It was more exciting that watching “Star Trek: The Next Generation” every Saturday evening in the Rasche Hall lounge. You guys remember watching STTNG? You ever heard of it? No? Oh, well watching Star Trek with a bunch of other geeks every Saturday evening was about as exciting as my romantic life ever got while I was in the VTCC.

Actually, that’s not true. I had a couple of abysmal boyfriends which was kind of exciting but they are best forgotten. Then I met the Hubster. We were so head-over-heels in love, it was sickening. However, he wasn’t a cadet, so we didn’t provide much fodder for the gossip mill in Rasche Hall. He was just another Star-Trek-watching geek I hung out with, except I liked to kiss him an awful lot. We haven’t changed much over the years, except that now we kiss while watching “The Daily Show.”

A few people got annoyed with me by this point in the comic series. They were sick of reading about “that damn party” that I had sent Irwin off to. “When are you going to get back to the funny comics?” they’d whine. “If you don’t like it, draw your own comics!” I’d whine back. Seriously, no one liked the story arc, which I thought was ashame. Rats was supposed to be about more than the usual hijinks in the VTCC. It was supposed to be about the characters, their little triumphs and crushing defeats, their hopes and dreams and greatest fears, they’re–

What? Oh, you want to know when I’m going to get back to the funny stuff.

Go draw your own damn comic! Meh…