45 years ago today, May 18, 1976.
It was the final days of my senior year at McClellan High School. My stint as humor columnist and cartoonist for the school paper, The Lion-Up, was ending with the last published issue of the year. Good-bye, grueling monthly deadlines forcing me to do something creative for 2 days out of every 30!
My junior year, I was the cartoonist, the first job for which I proved completely inadequate, as well as general gopher. I reported all performing arts related news, including the band and choir, employing a style best described as dull, if not downright soporific.
For the last issue that school year, I provided a full page illustration for the front page. It was a shameless rip-off of a Superman comic book cover, although most lazy hacks prefer the term “homage.”
Twenty years later, when I confessed my misdeed to Neal Adams, the creator of the original cover, he shrugged it off, saying, “That’s okay. It has been ripped off about a thousand times now.”
While this revelation fostered my sense of inept artistic community, my guilt was slightly elevated upon learning that I was unoriginal even in my unoriginality.
I was rewarded for my near-total lack of cartooning skill my senior year, when I became cartoonist *and* columnist. I named my humor column con-fab-u-la-tion because I envisioned it as a sort of informal chat. Each issue, I spewed whatever inanity I wished, foisting my overdeveloped sense of sarcasm upon an unwitting, occasionally unconscious, readership.
My final con-fab-u-la-tion column appeared in that May, 1976, issue, marking the last time for decades that anything I wrote was willingly read by more than 2 people. After that, I relied on the fact that people will peruse almost anything for pizza or booze. I hear 3 crates of gin worked wonders for Fitzgerald and “The Great Gatsby.”
In the ’90s, overcome by a desire to relieve myself in the waters of historic accuracy, I wrote “A Briefe History of the Codpiece.” My first “fact-free treatise” enjoyed meager popularity in various SCA newsletters, then online in the early days of the internet. (“Yeah, we didn’t have it easy like you young whippersnappers! We had to write our own HTML back in those days, which we chiseled into stone tablets.”)
A fitting epitaph for me, here are my last words to the McClellan student body, or at least the literate members thereof.
“In retrospect, I would like to say to those who (sic) I have insulted in one way or another that I am sorry.
“Sorry that I cannot come back and insult you again next year.”
