School's Out for Summer

As I look out upon the sea of youthful faces ready to take on the world with determination, dedication, hope, and mountain ranges of student debt, I am reminded of the words of countless commencement speakers from years, decades and centuries past.

"Look to the future, blah blah blah, something about challenges lying ahead, blah blah blah, commencement is not an end but a beginning, blah blah blah, follow your dreams, yada yada yada."

So herewith I present to you, the graduating class of 2017, a couple of full-page cartoons I drew back when I was following my dream of becoming the oldest college newspaper editorial cartoonist in the western hemisphere. This one is from 1993:

You may be too young to remember this, O class of MMXVII, but there used to be this thing called a newspaper, and it used to have a dozen pages of what were called Classified Ads, which was where you would look for jobs if you hadn't spent your undergraduate years currying favor with employers in your field. There was an internet, sure, but the only jobs on the internet were jobs making the dial-up noise sound less like Godzillas mating. And the only people interested in those jobs were geeky bespectacled nerds who spent every Friday and Saturday night hunched over their computer screens.

Which is even more depressing than you think, because this is what passed for internet porn in those days:

(•) (•)

) . (

(  v  )

Of course, those geeky bespectacled nerds are now richer than Croesus, and I use that expression because this graduation ceremony is the only place where anybody will know who the hell Croesus was.

But all was not necessarily doom and gloom as the Twentieth Century began to wane. In the year previous to the above UWM Post issue, I had drawn a more optimistic cover cartoon about the end of the school year.

Of course, that cartoon was about underclassmen, and has no relevance to you, O graduating seniors of Twenty and Seventeen.

Because you have one thing that they haven't got! A diploma! Hie thee hence from these hallowed halls of academe armed with your Th.D. in Thinkology, and go thither into the world to think deep thoughts. Just like Jack Handey.

Why, look at me. Yes, even I eventually took my leave from illustrating the editorial pages of the free campus paper and have since become a moderately, or to put a finer point on it, nearly successful cartoonist, wit, and bon vivant. But I never forgot where I came from.

Nor should you, O graduating class of the square root of 4,068,289. Remember where you came from, because you just might need to go back.

But call first to make sure your folks haven't converted your room into a home office.