While perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, it is fairly accurate to compare working at a university to being part of a feudal serf system. This was one of those strips that we received far more feedback from professors than from students. It also established Mr. Mittens first real activity as head of the faculty senate. Many more shenanigans would follow from his administrative work.
Dr. Bones makes a cameo in this strip, along with the Masked Professor and the old science professor. It became a running gag to reuse certain characters to fill out backgrounds.
Dr. Klownus was introduced the same week as two other characters—Dr. Bones and the Selecting Hat. For whatever bizarre reason, Dr Klownus is the one who has turned into more of a star character. He teaches German because no one else was teaching foreign language in the department yet.
Dr. Klownus is a lonely and grumpy character. He is constantly the butt of jokes because of his physical appearance (not a costume, he naturally has a clown’s face). He enjoys putting down American culture in comparison to his homeland of Germany, but in truth, he would never want to leave.
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Cartoon Appearances
No other strip has sat in our notebook longer than the Racer One strip. It was one of the first strips I ever wrote, but it was far from football season when it was written. So we simply tucked it aside and waited for a better time to run it. It has probably gone down so far as our most successful strip among students. We’re not sure what that says about school pride or animal rights.
The little boy and mother featured in the fourth panel are also the same ones from this strip from the previous semester. This kid gets a lot of punch lines for a rarely recurring character.
This strip originally featured the character of Evil Beard and Mr. Mittens in a bar together. However, after introducing Dr. Klownus and Dr. Bones just the week before, we felt we needed to reuse one of them. So Dr. Klownus got his first starring role in a strip.
This is the strip that really cemented the fact, both outwardly and to ourselves, that Megan and Mr. Mittens should almost always be together. She carries him around in a lot of strips, and in this one holds him silently while he drinks. It also established that Dr. Klownus’ face is his actual face and not a costume.
Of all the original strips, this was by far the biggest headache of them all. I am not sure if any of the humor comes off anymore, because we rewrote the thing 20 or more times. We really shot too big with it, wanting far too many characters and far too much going on. Add in the fact that we were introducing three whole new characters and it was just a mess.
In the second panel at the bottom left you may notice a character wearing a mask. No, he is not someone random or a bad drawing of the blind professor, as some have guessed. He was actually a character named, creatively, The Masked Professor. He was slated to become a recurring character, but we simply ran out of time and couldn’t fit him any of the remaining strips that year.
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