Hey, four-eyes–Maria Schneider is laughing with you, not at you.
Schneider, 36, writes the comic strip Pathetic Geek Stories. Or, her readers write the strip, in which Schneider illustrates their true stories of pathetic geek-hood with a devastating eye for dorky fashions past. (As she says on her Web site, www.patheticgeekstories.com, “I may not be the best cartoonist in the world, but I can draw a mean cheap sneaker.”)
The strip proves the saying, “Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh.”
Schneider, a staff writer for the satirical New York-based weekly newspaper The Onion, said she came up with the comic idea because “I wanted to do a weekly strip … and not have to come up with material.”
She started mining her friends’, and then strangers’, nerdy childhoods, and hit a rich vein that has not run dry for the 10 years the comic strip has run.
She receives about 10 submissions a week. Reading them is “cathartic,” she said, “but a lot of the stories send me back to being 13 years old”–a scary occupational hazard.
