Not-so-brief history of Spritz and my stint in graphic design: Let's see...
I got my first big gig drawing cartoons for my middle school newspaper, The Anchor and then later for my high school newspaper, The Crow's Nest (the schools were named after a local admiral, hence the nautical theme) where I also worked as an editor, my first experience with graphic design.
I started off at The Daily Beacon, my undergraduate college newspaper, as a copy editor. I switched to editorial production assistant after some training, where I scanned and adjusted photos and cartoons and pasted page proofs up for proof-reading. This is also when I learned QuarkXpress and Adobe Photoshop. Then I got to be the graphic design editor, which meant I got to help the editor-in-chief design the pages and be in charge and work long hours. After a semester of that, I volunteered to be a senior production editor. So what does working in production have to do with cartooning? Mostly because I elected to work over the summer, when most cartoonists are on break, so I asked the guy in charge if it was OK if I did a cartoon for the summer, and Spritz was born. I got the name looking at a spritzer bottle behind him while he was telling me I needed a name for my strip. I didn't stop drawing until I graduated, and as you can tell, the size of my cartoon has varied over the semesters from square to rectangle to a big block but is generally a one-shot type comic strip.
I got the jokes from life experience, mostly - roommate goings-on (check out my Evil Roommate Week cartoons - a lot of the items in the first panel were from the apartment I shared with 3 others), classes, stray conversations... Some cartoons I thought were complete crap people loved, and some I thought were awesome got next to no feedback. It's hard to predict what people will like.
Adrienne's ego trip: Tee-hee! I would be remiss in not mentioning that I've actually won awards for this! Besides a couple of Beacon Cartoonist of the Year awards, I made the top ten in a national contest (I'll fill in the name when I remember it). The biggest rush, though, was hearing people talk about it or having choice cartoons on their bulletin boards. In the end, even though I'm a biochem major, I made a compilation retrospect of Spritz my senior honors project, and the honors professor loved it! Someone told me he used it as an example to the last class. Wheee!
