Someone recently requested that I post some of the political cartoons I did when I was an undergrad, so while I’ve got the scanner out anyway, I decided that I would. (The strip pissed off enough people that I didn’t really want my name on it, but the editors insisted I be given credit, so we went with my initials, hence the “by D.K.” thing. Also, I redacted the names because I’m a nice guy.)
During hockey games against arch-rival school Bowdoin, it was a tradition for students to hurl objects onto the ice — objects such as oranges, tennis balls, and in one legendary (and perhaps apocryphal) case a decapitated cow’s head from a local slaughterhouse. Security became really tight for these games, and here we have a student who’s been caught trying to sneak in a few oranges under his coat:
I still remember walking into my first hockey game, which was like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Everyone in the audience was screaming, gesticulating, and massively intoxicated. The alcohol-laden exhalations were so thick in the air that they practically knocked you over. Students were leaning over the boards, yelling and gesturing and throwing stuff at the opposing players. One guy behind me yelled, “Hey goalie! I’m in your head! I’m in your head, man!” continuously for over two hours. There was much taunting, threats, and speculation about the sexual proclivities of both the players and their mothers. I was in awe of this. It was a spectator sport that was actually fun, since I’ve always enjoyed shouting at people a lot more than watching sports. Sadly, with school admissions getting tougher each year, the students became more and more studious and less and less wild, and by my senior year the hockey games had become sedate affairs, with students sitting politely with their hands folded in their laps. I tried to rally the troops, to bring back the grand old days, by doing all the trash-talking myself — one lone obscene voice piercing the night’s complacency, and I got thrown out. It was the end of an era.
This next comic involves a political scandal at the school. As I recall, it came out that one of the student body presidents had been in his office late into the night making phone calls to everyone he knew on planet earth, with all the charges going to the student body. This was in the wake of the Clinton impeachment (which seemed absurd even at the time and seems infinitely more so now that we’ve had a president who seems determined to do six impeachable things before breakfast each morning). Anyway, that’s why the two things are tied together here:
This next comic appeared in the winter of ’99 and played on the then-current fear of calamity caused by the Y2K bug. (“Jan Plan” was a special one-month, one-class January semester.)
And finally, here’s one involving the dean of students, whom we hated because of an incident in which he chewed us out over a party we’d had. The background for this strip: A TV had gone missing from a dorm lounge, and the dean suspected that a particular group of students had moved the TV into their private suite, so over break — while the students were away — he instructed security to search the suite. This search was a violation of school policy, which required that room searches be done only after the students had been informed and with them present.
I was really proud of how this one turned out. The first stormtrooper I tried to draw, on the left, looks a little screwy, but I really nailed it with the stormtrooper on the right. Unfortunately, the editors cropped the image in such a way that they cut out half my good stormtrooper, but whatever. We were sure that the dean was going to flip when he saw this cartoon, and that we’d be visiting him again real soon, but actually he loved the strip, and I heard that afterward he got a Darth Vader statuette or something that he kept on his desk. You can never tell with some people.
Leave a Reply