Lewis & Clara: CLAs and Odd Freshmen

As of this post I have successfully completed 1/3 of my Post-a-Day April event. However, it seems that my posting is skewing towards literature. Since we here at "Excuse the Quality" strive to bring you a wide variety of material, we've scoured the sketchbooks for ideas. Since this blog's roots are in comics lets do some of that.

You see throughout my time at college I was continually dissatisfied with the comics in the school's newspaper. They tended to by a bit wordy and a bit odd. It seems that every year I'd try my hand at doing something better, decide that my art wasn't good enough, become self-conscious and abandon the project. In fact if you look around the archive's you can find a number of my attempts at this. Here's one, here's another one, and these ones too! It's a cavalcade of mediocrity and failure. Ahhhh, good times.

My senior year was no exception to my yearly quests to best "The Pioneer Log". I'm pretty sure the strip I had planned for that year was going to be called "Lewis & Clara". I wanted the comic to have some continuing characters from strip to strip. I love how you newspaper strips have a certain expectation with them. There's something comforting about knowing that every time you open the comics section you can expect to find out what these fictional people are up to this time. An attachment can form between you and them. Ideas like this were (and possibly still are) quite different from where the ones featured in Piolog were coming from. As you might have guessed my main characters were a guy named Lewis and a girl named Clara. A simple joke, but I still find it slightly endearing in that dorky sort of way. There were a few others as well such as CLA agent Vlad.

This first one comic is a joke on Freshman. You see the Freshman arrive before the other classes do. Thus when you arrived at your dorm you'd find your floor already full of freshman who had already met one another and had already established relationships. It was always a slightly awkward scene to walk into. I've never heard any one share this sentiment, so it is quite possible I'm just weird that way.

I think in the first draft of this one the last panel ended with Clara knocking the Freshman out of her way. The exchange between her and Lewis went like this:
Clara: Shove off, Freshie!
Lewis: Jeez, harsh much?
Clara: He wasn't wearing any pants!
Lewis: Touche.

While I love the idea of someone's lack of pants as a rationale for violence, Lewis was right and I couldn't do it without her seeming like a jerk. Although even now I still maintain that if a naked person is blocking your path and spouting insane statements you are perfectly within your rights to give them a smack.

The next one is the latest installment of my inability to accept the Resident Assistants (RAs) changing their name to Campus Living Advisors (CLAs). Because CLA sounds like "Claw", and that just screams covert operations. This is the only appearance of CLA agent Vlad in my brief run, but I had many ideas for him. There was a particularly great one where he consoles a homesick student by telling her a story from his childhood, which, in short, was less than analogous. I actually showed this one to a friend of mine who was a CLA. She was slightly appalled by the idea of a CLA shooting a student, but frankly that's exactly why I find it so darn funny.

That's all I've got for you get for today. Come back tomorrow for some more insight on the project that was Lewis & Clara.