A long, long time ago in a college far, far away, young El Santo went to college. It was a small technical school, one that had a lot of math stuff but not much on the humanities or the liberal arts. El Santo really loved comics, tough, and he never gave up his childhood dreams about drawing for a living. So he hung around whatever awful in-school art exhibits he could and took all the arts courses he could find in non-affiliated arts schools. He also drew some doodles on paper and managed to get them printed in the college newspaper.
I have a certain nostalgia for the pre-internet days, when the most you could hope for was getting a comic published in the college rag. There were both benefits and drawbacks. The audience was smaller… but there was also a very good chance you’d be running into your readers when you were headed off to class, which meant immediate feedback.
I remember browsing through other college-published strips, and I noticed a lot of them had to do specifically with college life. That made sense, really. In a way, these strips were a more honest about life in college in than pretty much any other media. Movies and TV shows are primarily interested in grabbing viewers, especially the lucrative 18-34 demographic. So that means selling teenagers on the idea of college an endless fantasy Bacchanalia.
Most college strips I’ve seen, though, paint a less rosy picture. They touch on money struggles, study groups, and the constant feeling of tiredness. Which, frankly is how I remember college. When was the last time anyone in a movie college studied, anyway?
Which brings me to Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher and Deeper (or PHD for short) the quintessential college comic strip that made the jump to the internet. Mr. Cham began PHD when he entered grad school at Stanford in 1997, which means PHD has been going on for a remarkable 13 years.
Man, shouldn’t the characters have graduated by now?
