TITLE: "MSU Rap"

By: Sharif Shakhshir

Creator Comments:  This is a reference to an event covered in more detail and in a serious manner in this comic.

I remember dropping my friend off at his house after a night of drinking.  I was sober don't worry.  It was 2 AM and we had stopped drinking for at least 5 hours by that point.  We mostly shot the shit in an empty parking lot.  I drew dicks on the frosted windows of cars.  Quite poetic really.  We talked about writing and friends who write and stories of people.  He had just come back from a short trip.  One of the topics was how I was pissed that (despite online appeal) Mr. Faux had no popularity on campus.  Although neither did the school paper the quarter prior.  I was pissed that the common reaction was by philistines who believed every comic needed to be funny always.  So pissed I came up with this comic which was the most retarded fucking thing I could think of.  I hated it.  I'm very strongly motivated by negative emotions, but in a creative sense.  Of course that comes with debilitating drawbacks like being too depressed to work, etc.  Anger is good because it creates a lot of forward creative momentum.

Anyway, the next day as I was working on the drawings of the comic, I kept reading it to make sure it flowed.  I. could. not. stop. laughing.  It was just too fucking retarded and I was just adding stuff making it more retarded and more funny (to me anyway).  I mean "P-STINE!"

A lot of this is based upon Wu-Tang Clan and their relationship to kung fu films, which I only know about through conversations with my cousin Ramsey.

So what's in here?  Jokes about how many different Asian Christian clubs there are on campuHip Hop, politics, kung fu, Malcom X the anteater (panel 5), Doonesbury motif, a Stephan Pastis I-know-this-is-retarded-artist-insert-panel, and oh! a swipe at a fellow cartoonist.  I really didn't realize until just now how much shit I do with some of these comics.

Story about the last panel.  Adrian Ortiz (a fellow New U cartoonist) and I were talking at a party he had at his house.  We were talking shit about another cartoonist who does a comic called "Irvine Adventures."  The guy would use crazy copy and paste art and would require 8 panels to say nothing.  The editor at the time even told him that he couldn't have 8 panels anymore.  Note: I still get 8 panels.  Anyway we decided to start start taking shots at our fellow cartoonists starting with a joint assault on Irvine Adventures (did I mention that I'm motivated by evil?).   In the end Adrian was too drunk to remember our conversation.  So I unknowingly went solo.  Irvine Adventures disappeared for weeks after this comic.  I don't know if his work was simply rejected for being bad or if I cut his soul.  I like to think the latter because that means someone's reading my comic.

On a similar note: The paper had by this point shrunk the comics page from being a full page every week (sometimes laden with ads) to being a half a page to a page and subject to the editor's discretion.  Thus getting comics into the paper became much harder.  I actually started getting rejected.  As of this writing 2 comics were turned down.  The first of which is the next comic.