Eclecticism

Many years ago, I spent a few summers participating in the Johns Hopkins University’s CTY program — a combination summer camp and summer school for top-tier students (I got in through having scored a 1300 — back when the scores topped out at 1600 — on the SAT in 7th grade). Royce and I went together for one year in Claremont, CA; the following two summers I spent in Harrisburg (?), PA.

During one of the summers in Pennsylvania, one of the TA’s was a young man named Tim, who often filled his notebooks with cartoon doodles, many of which centered around the adventures of The Masked Guy. At some point during my time there, I ended up with copies of two of Tim’s Masked Guy drawings, and have had them floating around in the (many) stacks of papers that I’ve saved over the years.

Fast-forward to 2006. Well, today. About half an hour ago, actually. I was flipping through the (large) backlog of posts that I’d been ignoring in my newsreader when a link from Mike caught my eye: Everything I Know I Learned From the Bush Administration.

“That art looks really familiar,” I thought. “I wonder….” And soon I was digging through boxes, looking for those old Masked Guy cartoons.

Sure enough, there was one with Tim the Humble T.A….and the cartoonist is one Tim Kreider. While I can’t claim to remember Tim the Humble T.A.’s last name (if I ever knew it), the similarity in drawing styles is strong enough that I’m pretty sure that the two Tims are one and the same. Apparently this whole cartooning thing has been going well for him, as in addition to his The Pain website, he has a few books of cartoons for sale through Fantagraphics.

Neat, the random stuff you run across from time to time.