In addition to my regular Dessins feature, during my junior year at Hartland High School, I also did a comic strip entitled Not Reality in collaboration with my friend Jon Morgan. Jon wrote the text, and I drew the pictures. (Kudos to Jon for contributing this scanned image of NR!)
In this pilot episode of NR, we see many themes that are repeated in subsequent episodes. First of all, the main characters are always named after Jon and me, and they just happen to work for the "centerspread" (sort of like a features section) of a school paper called -- coincidentally enough -- the Hartland Eagle. Supporting characters would be introduced in future episodes, who were also patterned after our fellow students at the Eagle.
The plot of Episode 1 is fairly straightforward. Jon wanted to have a mascot for the centerspread, and thought it would be a good idea to have students from all over the school submit suggestions for the mascot's name. As it turned out, however, response from the student body was quite underwhelming. We got only one submission, and that was from one of my friends who (I think) felt sorry for us for not getting more feedback.
Sad though it is to relate, this early experience set the tone for the whole school year. Try as we might to come up with topics that would appeal to the students at large, we rarely if ever got any comments about NR (or Dessins either, for that matter) from our peers. Fortunately for us, we had so much fun making these comics that the lack of student feedback did not phase us at all.
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