And this week’s cartoon pretty much sums up everything in the previous seven episodes – uncomfortable uniforms, mandatory football game attendance, required show of spirit, and bad haircuts all around. Plus evil upper classmen having fun at the rats’ expense.

But it was all good. I recall the above incident actually happening, though I can’t say if I was a rat at the time or an upper classmen. I just know it happened, and it struck me as funny.

I do believe this is the last of the 2×2 format comics. I know I’ve said that before, and then continued uploading more 2×2 comics. I have no idea why I went with 2 panels across by 2 rows down. Where on earth did I get the idea for that format? It certainly looked like nothing I ever saw in a newspaper. I have no idea how the Collegiate Times worked around my idiotic formatting choice, but they did, and they never sent me any nasty-grams about it, so I am forever grateful to them for that. They were very patient with me, and mercifully criticism-free to a newbie comic artist.

What really puzzles me is the format and quality of the cartoons that follow. You’ll see what I mean next week. I know that the 2×2 cartoons were the first ones I drew and the first ones that ran in the CT. After that, I have a hard time establishing what order the cartoons ran in. I spent an evening or two sorting through all the strips I had, and was able to sort them into Year 01, Year 02, etc. But I can’t necessarily say I got them in the correct order beyond that. I do know that the artwork suddenly started to look a lot better, probably because I found a different pen to ink with and because I got better at erasing my pencil lines. But for some reason, I never seemed to stick with the same kind of pen or paper for too long. You’ll see examples of what I mean as we get further along.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Next week, we get more into the day-to-day details of life as a rat!

Amazing! We’re all the way up to episode 06! That’s mainly of interest to me because this was the last cartoon I did in the 2×2 panel format. After that, I switched to a regular 1×4 set up, which you’ll see next week.

The above incident actually happened to me my freshmen year. You might remember last week that I mentioned rats were required to speak up to all upper classmen in the hall and identify them correctly by name and rank without looking at them. That got old fast, so we tried to make our lives easier on ourselves by staying the hell out of the hallways. When we had to leave, we always listened at the door to see if we could figure out who was out there. One day, we stood at one side of the door listening, but couldn’t hear anybody. That’s because the upper classmen were on the other side of the door trying to figure out if we were in the room or not. I can’t recall why they wanted to know if we were in, but we sure surprised the hell out of them when we came rushing out the door all of a sudden, thinking the coast was clear. As I recall, everyone was too startled to worry about speaking up, and my roommate and I got out of the hallway without having to say much beyond, “Good morning Sir! Good morning Ma’am!”

Someone commented to me a couple of weeks ago that they couldn’t understand why I put up with all the crap I had to deal with being a rat in the VTCC. They thought it was depressing that I lived through that kind of hell for so long. To be honest, it was not my idea to join the VTCC. My dad insisted I had to at least try for an ROTC scholarship, or he wouldn’t pay for school. At that point in my life, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I only knew that college seemed like the next step to take, and I wasn’t ready to strike out on my own. So after lots of screaming and arguing, I agreed to put in for the scholarship. When I didn’t get it, I was relieved. Then I got accepted to Virginia Tech and Dad found out they had a full-time cadet corps, so he insisted I join that and try for the scholarship again next year. More screaming and arguing ensued, but again, I had no better plan for my life so Dad won that argument.

In hindsight, I have to admit Dad was right. I had no idea what I wanted to do after school. I picked both my major and my college at random. I don’t know why I wasn’t better prepared coming out of high school, but that’s how it was. Dad’s motivation for the ROTC scholarship was partly financial and partly patriotic. He truly believes that everybody should give something back to their country, and I believe it as well, though I think I would enjoyed doing that through some sort of volunteer service as opposed to military service. Peace Corp might have been cool. But again, I was too scattered at that point and didn’t have a plan.

I still didn’t have a plan for my life by the time I graduated, beyond staying as close to my boyfriend/future husband as possible. In fact, I didn’t get a plan until 3 days after my oldest daughter was born, which was also the day before my 34th birthday. Imagine going through the first 34 years of your life having no fricking clue what you want to do. That was me. But thanks to Dad and his insistence that I go into the military, I did acquire a lot of discipline, plenty of skills, and enough career experience that I could do any job I happened to come across. And I came across a lot of jobs that I didn’t particularly like but that I could do, and do well, thanks to my time as a cadet and officer in the Army Reserves. And so things always turned okay for me, more or less.

Today I know what I want to do, and I do it. And I still use that discipline I learned the hard way as a cadet. And when things don’t go right, or I have set backs, it doesn’t really bother me too much because I know I’ve been through lousy times before. It didn’t kill me back then, and it won’t kill me now. So to that person who thought my life as a cadet was miserable and depressing, all I can say is, “Hallelujah! I’m a better person for it!”

The above scenario actually happened to one of my buds, Valerie, and it was frikkin’ hilarious when it happened. It may not make sense to any of you civilians, so let me explain.

New cadets/rats were not allowed to walk in the hallways of the cadet dormitories, which were Rasch and Brodie Hall back then (they’re probably still Rasch and Brodie Hall, but I don’t keep up with this things, and I know they’ve been other dorms in the past and why am I going on about this now?). Anyway, rats weren’t allowed to walk in the hallways. We had to drag. Dragging is a fast-paced march, done at the very side of the hallway, up against the right-side wall. New cadets marched quickly, in single file, right shoulders scraping the wall until they came to a point where they had to turn. Then they did a 90 degree turn in the appropriate direction and kept going. If a new cadet ran into any obstacle in the hallway, like say one of those giant rectangular trashcans that were spaced about every 15 yards along the way, then the new cadet had to do those 90 degree turns all the way around the obstacle to get back to the right-side wall. If you were with a group of other rats, you all dragged together in single file to make a rat train. If you were on your own, you dragged on your own, and you hugged that damned right-side wall every step of the way. The only time a rat got to walk in the hallways was when he or she was on mail duty and needed to be able to look at the doors to deliver the mail.

Oh, and did I mention that while dragging, rats were not allowed to look around? Eyes had to stay straight ahead. You couldn’t look at anyone else in the hallway, even if that person was directly in front of you. That would be gazing, and gazing was bad. People got demerits and got dropped for push-ups and suffered all sorts of nastiness that upper classmen liked to visit upon rats if gazing occurred. So all the rats marched around the dorms like… well, rats in a maze, with blinders on.

Oh, and did I also mention that we had to speak up to everyone in the hallway and greet them by rank and last name? See, that’s what’s going on in the cartoon above. That particular rat has been caught dragging out in the hallway, and has spoken up but has not addressed the upper classman in question by rank and name! Honest to god, we were expected to know who was in the hallway just by the sound of their shoes and whatever other blurry details we could sneak a peek at through our peripheral vision. Sounds impossible, yes? And yet somehow we did it.

And just to make things even more interesting, because you know this wasn’t interesting enough, all new cadets could only leave the dorm through one doorway. And that doorway was at the exact opposite end of the building from where the female cadets were rooming.

So imagine this. It’s 8AM. I have a class on the far side of the campus in 20 minutes. I’ve got my shirt tuck done, my shoes polished and my books packed. I grab my hat (also called a cover in military parlance), fling open the door to my room and rush out into the hall. After three paces, I hit the far wall pop a right turn of precisely 90 degrees and start to drag. Every fucking upper classman on that floor is out in the hallway – heading to class, ironing uniform shirts, burning popcorn in the microwave oven, or taking a trip to the head (another military term meaning toilet). And as I’m dragging along the hallway, I hear their footsteps, catch a glimpse of their silhouettes, and say good morning to everyone of them by name and rank all the way through the whole damned building. I can’t look at anyone or just plain walk until I hit the door to the outside and then I can relax, just a little.

That was my life, every day for I can’t remember how many months. Crazy, ain’t it?

This was exactly what happened when my parents first abandoned dropped me off at Virginia Tech in 1987. Mom and Dad helped me get everything unpacked and into my room and then they turned me over to this crazed bunch of psychopaths that I was pretty sure had every intention of killing me slowly via that form of torture known as the push-up. And yeah, I was pretty scared about that.

This was not the first time away from home for me. I’d been to various summer camps and had even spent six weeks in Ireland as part of a study abroad program when I was sixteen. This was, however, the first time I’d been left in a situation I did not want to be in. Camp? Sure, I could do that. Ireland? I jumped at the chance. Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets? Hells no, I did not want to join that freaky outfit!

Except that I did, because back then I could not argue with my Dad and win. He was determined that I take ROTC at whatever school I went to. Little did I know that Virginia Tech had this mini-military academy stuck in the middle of the student body, and that I could not, COULD NOT, take ROTC without joining said mini-military academy. Oh, was my Dad overjoyed to hear this! Oh, did I so want to be run over by a bus before the start of my first semester of school.

But that didn’t happen and so away I went to Tech, where my parents and I were pleasantly greeted by a group of smiling, friendly upper class-men. And you better believe the nice act stopped the moment my mom and dad got into the car and drove away.

Again, my life back then was painfully funny. Emphasis on the painful part.

What’s painful now though is to look at the original cartoons. For the life of me, I have no frikkin’ clue why the Collegiate Times ran these damn things. They must have been desperate for content is all I can think of. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up both this week’s and last week’s cartoons – adding proper borders, erasing stray marks, redoing the text on the computer, etc. Here’s what the original cartoon looks like…

Pretty scary, huh? I knew so little about drawing comic strips, it never even occurred to me to draw borders all the way around each panel. I just did those little crossbars things and left it at that. Duh. As for the lettering? Well, this comic strip was drawn so long ago, we didn’t have scanners to get the artwork into the computer, so adding the lettering in a graphics program would have been a moot point.

Regardless of how badly I drew these first cartoons, the CT ran them, for which I am forever grateful. Now more than 20 years later, I get to clean them up and run them again. I hope you enjoy.

A long time ago (back in 1989, to be exact), in a galaxy far, far away (Blacksburg, Virginia), there was a 20-year-old college student who had nothing better to do with her time than sit and draw cartoons about the Virginia Tech Cadet Corps, of which she was a member.

No, I’m not kidding, I was actually a cadet in college. I wore a uniform everyday, had room inspections and PT, and I even had an Army ROTC scholarship.

I was a lousy cadet, which should surprise no one. Back then, I had yet to develop a passion for fitness, so all the running and push ups and hauling around of 50 lbs of equipment on my back was pretty much my own personal version of Hell. And you just know I had problems with authority. Plus I had no prior experience with the military, in spite of the fact that my dad was career Army (every time he discussed work, yours truly pretty much tuned out). That meant I was completely clueless about things like saluting and marching and singing jodies, etc. Yet in spite of all that, I somehow made it through four years of ROTC and the Cadet Corps, which was like being in a military academy tucked inside the civilian student body (probably somewhere around where the gall bladder would be… get it? Tucked inside the student body, near the gall bladder… oh never mind).

The four years I spent at Virginia Tech were some of the most exhausting, frustrating, and painful times of my life. And yet they were also hysterically funny. After two years in the Corps, I started drawing cartoons about what it was like to be a rat; that is, a freshman cadet. No matter how much I advanced through college and the Corps, I always felt like a rat — confused, hopelessly lost, distracted, and frazzled. Not much has changed since those days, really.

I drew four years worth of Rats! for the Virginia Tech Collegiate Times. That was two strips a week for nine months of the year. Last weekend, I dug through my closet and found all my old strips. Some are in pretty bad condition and need serious restoration. Most are just fine, though. None of these have ever been published anywhere but in the CT, and then not since 1993, the year I finally stopped drawing Rats! and got married and moved on with my life.

I hope you enjoy Rats! You’ll be seeing it here every Thursday until I run through all the original strips. I figure that should take three years. I’ll be running the cartoons in chronological order, so what happens in the strip probably won’t match up with what’s going on the real world (i.e. strips drawn for Christmas or Spring Break will appear when they turn up in the order they were drawn, and not necessarily at Christmas or Spring Break). So sit back and enjoy. You’re about to get a sneak peek at four of the wildest years of my life.