About Zach Martz, Part 2

<=Back After graduating from high school in 2002, I started at Dickinson in the fall of that year. I continued writing my book, but at a very slow pace. It was freshman year that I started reading the newspaper and following current events (and this was during the buildup to the war in Iraq, so there was a lot to follow). Although most of my freshman year I spent hanging out with my ROTC bud, Chad, I wrote several articles for the school newspaper during this time as well.

My sophomore year of school was a bit different. My roommates this time were very much into the whole college partying thing, and while I sometimes joined in their get-togethers, I never really got into that whole thing. This year was when I really got the feel of what college is like. It was here that I officially signed on as a history major, and for my Historical Methodology course, I did a major research project on the politics of the Reagan administration (which partly was an excuse to listen to lots of 80s music without people thinking I was behind in the times). In the spring of my sophomore year, I came up with the idea for "Saving Jack's Brain".

How did the idea for my comic strip come to fruition? Well, it started from reading through one of my old "Calvin and Hobbes" books one night, and I started thinking about how cool it might be to draw my own serial cartoon. I eventually decided that it didn't really matter how much my drawing skills sucked (I make Scott Adams look like da Vinci), and so I came up with the idea to do a strip about something that I could relate to, like the life of a college student. To make the strip more engaging and for it to provide a solid commentary on the life of a collegiate, I decided to throw in references to current events, much like "Doonesbury" or "Boondocks". Of course, the world would have to be presented from a college student's point of view, much like "Calvin and Hobbes" is presented from a child's point of view. More=>

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