The headlines say this is a cheeseball year to be a college senior. Flat job market. Bathroom walls papered with rejection slips. Student loans carrying the same odds of prompt repayment as the Bolivian national debt.
All this, mind you, after four years of hassling over hate speech, date rape, frat spats and political correctness. At 10 grand a semester, no less.
But headlines do not begin to tell the whole story if you are Brown University senior Jeff Shesol.
If you are Jeff Shesol of Providence-by way of Aurora, Colo.-1991 looks like a very good year to be graduating from college.
Not only will the 21-year-old Shesol (rhymes with nestle) enter Oxford University next fall on a Rhodes scholarship, but he has also just published his first book, ”Thatch,” a collection of cartoon strips from the pages of the Brown Daily Herald (and carried in 200 college newspapers nationwide), issued by Vintage Books. Hailed as the next ”Doonesbury” by many in the national media, ”Thatch” boasts a character named Politically Correct Person, who, in the manner of other caped crusaders before him, fearlessly champions the causes of truth, justice and the Lithuanian-Ukrainian-A merican Way.
Holy oppressed minorities! How hot is the sizzle around Shesol? Put it this way. When you are guaranteed a one-year deal by a leading cartoon syndicate on the off chance you might take up the profession, and People magazine and ”Good Morning America” line up to interview you a month before commencement, you are no longer just BMOC (Big Man On Campus). You are also INOZ (Important New Observer of the Zeitgeist) and possibly even SFEG
(Spokesperson for an Entire Generation).
Why, even Brown President Vartan Gregorian, the target of more than a few ”Thatch” zingers himself, says he is a big fan and predicts ”great things” for you as an artist and writer.
Ordinarily, university presidents think of student cartoonists in terms of prison sentences.
”Being compared to guys like (Garry) Trudeau and Berke Breathed (`Bloom County`) is flattering, since they`re my idols,” says Shesol, strolling across campus recently. ”But I have a long way to go to fill their shoes. I`m not the only one of my generation who`s going to do a comic strip. I`m just the first to get a fair amount of attention.”
Understatement, dude. Shesol`s work has been reproduced in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, two newspapers that normally publish cartoons only when attached to major trends or events.
Holier-than-thouness
A Newsweek cover story last winter on college ”thought police” featured a Shesol strip in which Insensitive Man, P.C. Person`s sworn archenemy, advises a young kid to refer to the opposite sex as ”chicks.”
”We don`t call them `chicks!”` P.C. Person lectures the lad. ”Or
`girls!` They`re women!”
”They`re 9 years old,” the boy retorts.
”Well, they`re pre-women!”
P.C. Person is a timely and inspired creation, given the cloud of holier- than-thouness hovering over many college campuses today. But Shesol has more than one wacko character up his sleeve. There is the strip`s eponymous leading man, J. Thatcher, who, when not in his superhero disguise, copes with traditional undergraduate challenges, like getting a date or passing for a Republican.
Another key player, Thatch`s roommate, Tripp Biscuit, might be called the Ivy League equivalent of ”Bloom County`s” Steve Dallas: a narcissistic playboy whose sensitivity quotient ranks somewhere between Frank Sinatra and suet.
Grade B drawing
These and other denizens of ”Wayland University” are rendered in a style that borrows unabashedly from Trudeau and Breathed. Like that of
”Doonesbury,” which debuted in the late 1960s as a Yale Daily News strip, before its syndicated launch in 1970, the humor in ”Thatch” consistently transcends its campus setting in ways that hint at a bright postgraduate future for this crew.
While the artwork is relatively unpolished, as Shesol himself is the first to admit, the writing is topical, witty and almost perversely political. Last summer Shesol interned in Washington for Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.). The result: a series of strips in which Thatch is ordered to infiltrate the Republican National Committee. He does fine in the pre-programming stage (”The ERA is bunk,” he repeats. Or, ”I`m no tree-hugger”) until forced to mouth the phrase, ”Dan Quayle is growing in office,” whereupon he retches. Mike Doonesbury would be proud.
”Bloom County,” the most innovative American strip of the 1980s, is an even more obvious influence.
”My generation is a little young to relate to `Doonesbury,` even though I love it,” says Shesol. ”We really ate up `Bloom County` though. It was a cruel irony that Breathed ended the strip on my 20th birthday. There`s a lot of Milo Bloom in Thatch. He`s the cool, dispassionate observer. The setup guy. Like me, you might say.”
Observe, please, that while in high school in Colorado, where ”Thatch”
first appeared in somewhat cruder form, Shesol was a champion debater. It was a sideline he would continue at Brown until he burned out at the 1989-90 World Championships and threw himself into cartooning.
In debating it is academic whether you personally agree with the point your side argues. Success comes from knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your position so thoroughly that your opponents fail to punch holes in it.
Shesol still coaches debating at a local high school, and it is not stretching the point to theorize that his greatest strength as an artist is the ability to bring the intellectual discipline of debate to the wild-and-crazy freedom of cartooning. Certainly no position on the ideological spectrum gets spared his poison pen.
”Generally they`re my own views in the strip, but I do try to pick them apart at the same time,” Shesol says. ”What bugs me most about the politically correct, I guess, is this aura of infallibility they carry around with them. There`s no value placed on discussion or debate. To me it`s a fundamentally illiberal phenomenon.”
No offense
”Thatch” may be the darling of PC-bashers everywhere, but it took some trial and error on Shesol`s part to nail it down. His freshman year, Shesol relates, he tried out as an editorial cartoonist, submitting one cartoon a week. He admits now that his lack of gifts as a caricaturist frustrated him.
”I wish I could draw as well as Pat Oliphant or Jeff MacNelly,” he says with a sigh, ”but they`re in another league. Maybe some day.”
Over the summer before his sophomore year, Shesol resurrected ”Thatch,” supplying it with new characters and a fresh storyline. The reconfigured strip appeared in the Daily Herald the following fall, running four times a week. It was a big hit. Last year, when political correctness became a widespread phenomenon, if not a campus buzzword, Shesol began making notes on a new character. P.C. Person swooped down on Brown as the 1990-91 school year opened.
It was a most propitious debut. As the year unfolded, Brown drew widespread attention when the names of several alleged student date-rapists were scrawled on a bathroom wall and a student was dismissed for making inflammatory remarks in public about gays and minorities. Media files were suddenly bulging with take-outs on the New Intolerance. ”Thatch” seized the moment with impeccable timing. While a few protest letters trickled into the Daily Herald, most students reveled in Shesol`s lampooning. Even the lampoonees.
”Everyone on campus reads Jeff`s strip, but it`s really not all that controversial,” says James Kaplan, the Daily Herald editor. ”He does it in such a lighthearted way that even the hardcore PC types seem to get a laugh at it.”
Shesol was suddenly in demand too. At a panel discussion this spring, he appeared on the dais with, among others, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis and the Boston Globe`s Ellen Goodman. The topic was hate speech. A panelist from the University of Wisconsin commented that one function of today`s students is to act as ”enablers.” Shesol responded that what he saw around campus were ”enablers out of control.”
”What I meant,” he explains, ”is that there are students who go around `correcting` everyone`s point of view. They even butt into dining-hall conversations that have nothing to do with them. It gets really offensive.
”Race issues do come up,” he adds, ”but mostly it`s this giant gender gap. Like it`s no longer politically correct to be a white male. The attitude seems to be: `Well, they`ve never suffered. They`ve never been oppressed.”`
RFK his hero
Such pronouncements, made on the comics page and elsewhere, have caused outside observers to label Shesol as some sort of neo-conservative, or
”right-wing Trudeau.” Not so. His political hero happens to be Robert F. Kennedy (Shesol`s senior honors history thesis, submitted recently, explores the longstanding feud between RFK and Lyndon Johnson), and his favorite era is the 1960s.
On balance he wears the ”liberal” label with a good deal more pride than some presidential candidates that come to mind. Were he to forgo cartooning as a profession (a distinct possibility, Shesol says), he would like to work in Washington, perhaps specializing in health-policy issues.
Right now he has other options to consider, like the two years in England he`ll spend studying modern British history. He also hopes to refine his artistic technique and-Who knows?-perhaps fool around with taking ”Thatch”
off campus. Certainly, should he accept the syndication offer and bring
”Thatch” back in a couple of years, it won`t look or read like a college strip.
”I have no intention of drawing `Funky Weatherbean` for the rest of my life,” says Shesol. Whereupon he describes his plan for the final ”Thatch” installment: Thatch and one of his buddies, unable to land gainful employment, heading off to see America in an old, beatup van dubbed the Bus o` Truth. Very hip. Very `60s.
If you are Jeff Shesol, Class of 1991, there is a heck of a view through that windshield.
