Old School Geek

Here's an oddity from my files. About six or seven years back I was considering creating another online comic, but unlike Femme Noir, Perils On Planet X and Gravedigger, I thought I'd try my hand at a humor strip instead of serialized adventure.

Since "geek"/gaming humor seemed (and continues) to be the most popular genre for humor webcomics, I thought I'd write a strip about my high school days in the early 80's and what passed for geek culture back then. The original Dungeons & Dragons and other classic RPGs, TRS-80 computers, Atari 2600 game consoles, cable TV, and whatever science fiction and fantasy fiction I remembered being particularly popular at the time among my peer group.

I called it "Old School Geek" - shortened here to "Old School" before I saw that awful Will Farrell movie - and asked my friend Chuck Bordell, an artist I'd worked with in the past, to draw it. It was actually based on a comic strip I had drawn back when I was in my 20s for the amusement of my old high school buddies, and like that strip, used my former classmates as the main characters. The goofball above with the curly hair, sideburns and glasses is a caricature of yours truly, circa 1982.

I'm pretty sure we only produced two finished strips, and this is the only one I can find. I decided that this kind of writing wasn't really my forte, and felt that the jokes (if you can call them that) were too "inside."

Anyway, I stumbled across this tonight and thought it would be interesting to post it here. Click on the image for a more readable size.