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Click on the thumbnail above to see the cartoon.

Yea verily, I am seriously behind this week on blog posts, and this one almost didn’t make it today. Blame it on Balticon, people. That con wipes me out every year.

But I did get this week’s episode of Rats! up before the end of the day. I dedicate this episode to all LOST fans who were frustrated by the series finale. Personally, I thought it worked with only a few minor flaws, but I know some people are hopping mad about it. My condolences to you 😉

I spent many a weekend in Jefferson National Forrest with my Army ROTC unit, tramping through the woods, camping out in the snow and the rain, getting mud in all my various hard to reach spots, and eating lots of MREs, the ultimate in haute cuisine. And let me just say to this day, I do not miss it one bit. I hated going out on Field Training Exercises (FTX). I think those things were specifically designed to screw me over. I have said it before and I’ll say it again. I was a lousy cadet. I made a fairly decent officer once I got into the actual Army, but ROTC was not for me.

Anyway, here’s hoping all this past year’s rats at the good ol’ VTCC survived the year. Good luck being upper classmen next year. I’ve got cartoons all about that too.

So I know I said last week that there were more Great General Pumpkin cartoons coming up, and there should have been but for the life of me, I can’t find them! I know I have them. I’ve seen them! But they weren’t in my Year 01 or Year 02 folder, and it’s too late at this point for me to hunt them down.

Therefore, we move on to first aid. In Army ROTC, the junior and senior cadets were expected to teach classes on common tasks to the freshmen and sophomores. First aid was one of those subjects. I tell you, there’s nothing like standing in front of a bunch of freshmen, struggling to remember the symptoms for shock or how to splint a broken leg while your ROTC instructor is standing behind you with a clip board grading every little thing you do. And it doesn’t get any easier because once you actually get into the Army (or the Air Force or the Navy or the Marines), you must continue to teach other folks how to do things like this. In fact, one of my jobs in the Army Reserves was training officer. Not only did I have to teach class, but I also had to put together the training plan for the entire unit every single month. Not an easy task to do.

Anyway, it was always kind of fun to be a freshman watching the upper classmen try to run a class, but not so much fun a couple years down the line when it was your turn to teach someone else.

I’ll keep looking for the Great General Pumpkin cartoons. I know I have them somewhere. But if I don’t find them, we’ll continue on with the Army ROTC cartoons for a few weeks, ‘kay?

Mea culpa. I don’t know why this didn’t go up first thing this morning, but you know, sometimes life happens.

Anyway, this is where the cartoons start to get out of sync with the current calendar date. Right now, in the real world, it’s Spring, it’s balmy, things are turning green everywhere and summer isn’t too far off. But in the world of Rats…

We’re into a series of cartoons I drew for October of 1989, and the subject was Pumpkin Wars. Every October, the freshman/rats had to come up with a jack o’lantern that the upper classmen dubbed the Great General Pumpkin. The Great General Pumpkin was stationed in the company area on the desk where the announcements board was posted. So long as he was there, we had to speak up and act as normal in the company area. But if the Great General Pumpkin disappeared from the company area, the rats got to be “at ease” in the halls and didn’t have to speak up to anyone. I can’t recall if it was just in the company area halls or the entire dorm. Part of me wants to say the entire dorm because I have this vague memory of being in Kilo Company area (which was where all the 2nd Battalion female dorm rooms were, regardless of what company you were in) and seeing a lot of upper classmen scowling at me because they knew our pumpkin had gone missing and I didn’t have to speak up. But I can’t be sure because my memory on that is not so clear.

Anyway, the promise of “at ease” in the hallways and no speaking up lead to some pretty wild antics on the part of the freshmen to hide the Great General Pumpkin, which in turn led to some pretty wild antics on the part of the upper classmen to find him and restore him to his place. You’ll see that play out over the next few weeks, as I drew a few more strips on the subject.

Sorry again about being late today. Honestly, I have no idea why this did not go up on time today!

You never, ever want to burn your popcorn in the dorm microwave because:

You will set off the dorm fire alarm…

You will create a horrendous odor that will linger in the dorm hallway for days…

And you will piss off anyone who was hoping to mooch some popcorn off you, because you burned it and now it’s no good anymore.

I learned this lesson many a time in my days at Tech.

We’ve had absolutely lovely weather where I’m at this week, but even so, looking at the cartoon above still gives me a chill. Blacksburg in late Fall through early Spring can be pretty miserable, especially if you have to wear a uniform. I recall the everyday or “gray-bag” uniforms as being on the rather light weight side. Sure the pants were a wool blend, but they had also been worn by a couple hundred other cadets over the previous several decades! Everything was hand-me down or previously worn(out), and none of it up to the frigid chill of a Blacksburg winter.

The rain coats were probably the worst. They were designed to cover a cadet from neck to mid-calf. They were this god-awful heavy rubber, with a caplet at the top that tended to flap in a good wind so that on a really stormy day all the cadets looked like giant bats haunting the campus. It was a pain to wear, and an even bigger pain to figure out what to do with once you made it to class. I mean really, the thing was big, cumbersome and sopping wet. Was I supposed to put it in my chair and sit on it? Not. Hang it from some non-existent coat hook? You jest, right? Or maybe I was supposed to leave it in the hall and pray no one walked off with it?

Anyway, one thing I do not miss about being a cadet is wearing those uniforms on a cold, windy, rainy day.

I’m going to curl up with my heating pad now. BRRRRRRRRRRR!

No, your eyes do not deceive you. You are getting two strips this week. And yes, these have both appeared on the blog already, but in a different format. The originals are here and here if you want to compare.

For the life of me, I am not sure why I redrew these. I mean, yeah, both strips look a lot better redrawn. And the newer strips are in the 1×4 format instead of the original 2×2 so they look consistent with the vast majority of the other strips I drew over the four-year run. But why did I redraw these two particular strips?

My first thought was that maybe I had redrawn these in the summer of ’91, after I had graduated and was working as a recruiter for the VTCC (yes, I was a recruiter, which is rather scary when you think about it. Me, recruiting new cadets. Egads, what was I thinking? And what was the VTCC thinking when they hired me?!). That summer, I was asked to put together a collection of the best Rats! cartoons to leave in the lounge at Rasche Hall, where potential recruits came to visit. So it would have made sense for me to redraw two of what I thought were the funniest (but worst drawn) cartoons I had.

But then I noticed that one of the strips was dated ’89, the first year I drew Rats! And that same strip had “reduce 79%” written on it, which was the CT’s short hand for how much to reduce my original cartoon so it would fit in the newspaper. So obviously at least that cartoon was redrawn and reprinted in the newspaper the same year it ran the first time. As for the second, I can’t find a date on it or evidence of it having gone to the CT for printing, but it’s so similar in style – same paper, same type of pen. And since I frequently switched the types of papers and pens I used to create the comics, I’d say it’s fairly certain this one was redrawn at about the same time and ran again in the paper as well.

I can also say that these cartoons were redrawn on the same paper using the same pen that I was using when I switched from 2×2 panels to 1×4 panels (are you dizzy yet from all these minute details?). So they both obviously belong to the batch of cartoons drawn in ’89-’90.

But again, I have no idea really why I redrew them. I just realized that I did, and so I thought I’d post the nicer versions together this week. Just so you can see how much the cartoons had changed in the space of a few months.

I cannot tell you how dead tired I am right now. I spent last weekend at Ravencon, partying like I was still in my early twenties which I’m not. And now, even half a week later, I’m still dragging ass and trying to catch up on work. It’s killing me, I tell ya.

Of course, PT used to kill me too. I can recall all too well getting up at 4:30AM (or 0430 for you military types) to trek all the way across campus to Lane Stadium to run stadium steps for an hour for ROTC. Well, I didn’t exactly run the stadium steps, not after the first lap. I more like limped as fast as I could up the steps and tried not to dry heave all over the place.

Yes, I was the cadet who could barely make the 2-mile run, and had to struggle to crank out even 10 push-ups. While I had taken quite a few dance classes and been a member of the marching band in high school, I was in no way prepared for the physical demands of being a cadet, especially not when you threw in sleep deprivation on top of everything else. To this day, I don’t know how I finally managed to eventually pass the APFT. I flat out hated PT sessions, and couldn’t stand running in formation (I was always tripping over the guy in front of me, or tripping up the guy behind me). However, once I graduated and got my commission, things sort of turned around. I eventually got good enough at PT to score a 260 out of 300 on the APFT, and to this day I do my best to stay active – running, water aerobics, 4 hours of karate class most weeks, etc. I’m a little heavier than I was back in college, but I can still wear the same size clothing, so I guess I’m doing something right.

Anyway, the cartoon above best spells out how I felt about ROTC and the VTCC at any given time. And it’s also my favorite of all the Rats! cartoons I ever drew. I recall the night I finished drawing it, I thought it was perfect! And then I accidentally knocked a whole can of Coke over the finished product…

So after much swearing and tearing out of my hair, I sat down and redrew the cartoon all over again. And it was still my favorite cartoon the second time around.

Hope you all enjoy today’s cartoon.

Pie Day is another one of those customs that I don’t know if they do anymore in the VTCC or not. Essentially, Pie Day is what it says it is, as illustrated in the cartoon above. Freshman cadets got to choose their “favorite” upperclassmen to pie (that is, to smack in the face with a paper plate full of shaving cream or sometimes whipped cream). Pie-ing was a fun activity on any day, but on Pie Day, it was a big deal, with the entire corps out there watching to see who got voted to be pied and who was going to do the pie-ing. Or rather, who thought the were going to do the pie-ing. Some of those upperclassmen did not go down without a fight.

In order to pie someone any other day, you had to get permission, and that permission had to come from someone higher up in the chain of command than the person you wanted to pie. My freshman year, all the females were stuck in one end of Rasche Hall on the fourth floor (I lived in room 416, for the curious). The 2nd Battalion staff also lived in that same area, including the battalion XO, a formidable woman by the name of Cadet Major Wist (I think that was her name anyway; I do recall she seemed rather intense and scary). Well, all the female rats in my company got permission from the 2nd Battalion commander to pie the XO, and we ambushed her in the stairwell one evening when she was coming up with a fresh, hot pizza she’d just had delivered. Both the pizza and the XO ended up covered in shaving cream. I recall Cadet Major Wist asking us very calmly who had given us permission to pie her, and when we told her, she headed to the Battalion CO’s room and trashed it thoroughly. So we kind of got a two-fer-one there against the upperclassmen.

Back when I worked as a government contractor at an Air Force base, I occasionally ran into some of those upper classmen. It was always a little odd to see them again, now in the military and working hard at their jobs. I went into the Army Reserves after college, and I occasionally ran into a few of my fellow classmates there as well. Since leaving the workforce and the military, I don’t run into anyone any more. If any of you guys are out there reading this, either from Hotel ’91 or just from the VTCC at any point in time, feel free to give a yell. I won’t bite, I promise, and I swear I will not hit you with a shaving cream pie…

Unless someone higher ranking than you gives me permission to do so.

Another little joke about Shultz dining hall, which I understand is soon to close. How sad. I will never forget that wonderful eatery. The fine dining, the friendly service, the delightful decor…

Wait. We’re talking about Shultz? Sorry, I was waxing poetic about Macadoo’s. Or maybe Bogen’s. No, most likely the Mill Mountain Coffee Shop. No idea which of those is still around and kicking.

But about this week’s cartoon. Yeah, I think there may have been the occasional complaint that us cadets were allowed to carry weapons on campus. I shake my head over this one. Our weapons were limited to the sabers carried by senior cadets for formal occasions and the Skipper, the canon a crew of cadets would fire at home football games every time the Hokies scored a touch down. Again, the year before I joined the VTCC, Tech was caught in a recruiting scandal and wasn’t allowed to recruit for four years after, so I don’t recall hearing the Skipper fired all that often.

More deadly than any cadet corps saber would have been the spoons at Shultz dining hall. They were like the spoons you see in prison movies (think “The Shawshank Redemption”). A lot of the edges had been filed down over the years by so many grinding teeth, they were sharp enough to cut through concrete. Sadly though, not sharp enough to cut through the food served at Shultz.

Although I can’t say the food was really all that bad. I mean, I have had worse. Hell, I was in the Army Reserves for 11 years. You know I’ve had worse.

And no, I will not talk about my own failed experiments in cooking at this point in time.

Enjoy the cartoon, and think fondly on dear old Shultz.