Yet another item that got derailed last week, thanks to the stomach bug. I try to get all my blog posts for the week, including the Rats! posts, done by Sunday evening. And I was just getting ready to head up to the office and scan this in when I realized what I really wanted to do instead was puke in a bucket. Life’s funny like that, you know?
Anyway, here is a scene that happened all too often when I was a cadet. I’d be right in the middle of something like a shower, dying my hair, writing a paper, etc., and someone would burn their popcorn badly enough that the fire alarms went off and we all had to head outside. Fun.
The interesting thing to note about this image is that all the rats in the last panel are named. These were the rats in Hotel Company my junior year, when I first started drawing the Rats! cartoons. I think they may have just completed company initiation, an event where new cadets are run ragged before being formally accepted into the company. As I recall, this was something that usually happened in November, prior to Fall Break. My own company initiation two years earlier was a real hoot. After spending several hours on Friday combing every last inch of the campus to find the company guidon, we were given pass for the rest of evening, with orders to be back in bed by midnight. I know once I got the sand out of my shorts (they made us low crawl through the sand traps of the campus golf course), I basically said, “Screw the pass, I’m going to bed.” Others, however, went out and stayed out. I think at least one cadet came back very late… just in time for the upper classmen to come banging on our doors at 5AM and yell at us to get into our dress uniforms for another round of torment.
Fun times, people. By the way, the best way to get a drunk rat through the hallways is to sandwich him or her between two sober rats as they drag through the dorm. Just watch it on those 90 degree turns. You might accidentally tip your buddy and send them crashing to the floor.
