Typical Day
Sketch McInkblot wakes up at 7:00AM so he doesn't miss his 8:30AM class. He's a senior at Midvale University, heading into his final semester. Sketch is an aspiring cartoonist with big dreams that are matched only by his big college debt. He double-majored in fine arts and graphic design.
Yeah, his advisers were a little confused, too. But he wanted to study traditional art to help improve his drawing, and the graphic design was to make sure he at least had more career options after graduation (other than police sketch artist), should cartooning not work out.
He's been working on strip ideas off and on throughout his entire college career. He didn't even have to burn the midnight oil too often. It turns out there's a lot of free time to be had in art classes.
He once drew and lettered five four-panel strips during a single lecture in History of the Development of the Discombobulating Incomprehensibility of Post-Modern Neo-Deconstructionism 201. His output was almost as good during How to Get Government Grants Creating Art Nobody Likes 105 lectures.
He never draws during his History of Modern Art classes, though. That stuff's way too hilarious to miss.
Anyway, Sketch started submitting to editors in the second semester of his junior year. For the most part, all he got were rejection notices or no response at all. As his stuff improved however, the editors (perhaps sensing a budding talent) took to giving a more thorough explanation in their rejections.
"I don't like it," one explained. "It isn't funny." Another offered up, "Are these jokes? I don't get the jokes. It needs better jokes." However, another editor expressed a sense of something familiar in Sketch's work. "You again? No, no, and still no. Please stop sending me these cartoons."
Success hasn't exactly come easily for Sketch. It hasn't come at all, in fact. But he's read the background of pretty much all the top cartoonists and is well aware that nearly all of them were rejected several times before their strips finally took off. He's going to keep on drawing, submitting, and resubmitting. He's got a dream, after all.
Not to mention crushing debt from four straight years of tuition loans. They'll defer payment for a while after graduation, but not forever. If he can't land a gig as a syndicated cartoonist, Sketch is well aware he'll eventually have to consider looking for a real job. And that is not what people study art for.
So, today Sketch is at his 8:30AM The Avant Garde's Utility for Declaration of Self Sophistication and Criticism of the Art Bourgeois lecture, still drawing away while the professor drones on. But he isn't drawing his normal characters this time. Today, out of sheer boredom and depression, he's more or less drawing cartoonish self-images.
He's drawing a young man, locked in the interminable lectures of self-important professors, all the while imagining his parents' constant fretting about whether Sketch will get a job and his own eventual embarrassment if he doesn't.
He has a sudden idea. Sketch remembers Watterson's comics lampooning the art and education industries, and Scott & Borgman's comic Zits about a teenage boy, his parents, and their general inability to communicate. Sketch has a new idea for a strip.
Two months later, after drawing straight through numerous expensive college lectures, Sketch is waiting for word back from an editor he submitted his new strips to. He's wondering how wise it was to try out the guy who's last rejection started with "You again," but there isn't anything to be done about it now.
The email finally shows up in his inbox with the subject line "Let's set up a meeting." Sketch passes out cold in his room.