- Prospies (Prospective Students) are usually juniors and seniors in high school who want to get a taste for the college by sleeping over and immersing themselves, for at least one night, in the college experience. I would imagine that most of these kids just want to get drunkk, or high, or laid, during this brief respite from their parents. My roommate, Paul Carlson [see: every fifth episode] , was a big fan of hosting prospies, and I think by the end of freshman year we had six or seven under our belts. The only prospie I can clearly remember is a kid named Tom, who (how do I put this nicely?) was very clear in his goals and ambitions, and it seemed that he had determined very early in the night that Grinnell was not for him. Paul has a better memory about these things than I do, but I remember playing pool with a very talkative Tom, and exchanging rolled-eyes glances with Paul. Anyway, I don't think Tom ended up going to Grinnell, but his memory lives on in this episode.
- Every semester there was a campus-wide game called Assassination -- a last-man-standing role playing game for trigger-happy, blood-thirsty Grinnellians. After you sign up, you get a photo-copy of your first target's student ID, and at the appointed start time (usually dusk on a Friday afternoon, I think), you hunt your prey and shoot them with a squirt gun before they figure out who's got their number. The exciting part is, as you're hunting, you're also being hunted. Once you've killed your mark, you go after their target, and so on. One strategy, which Johnny is illustrating, is to just hide out until everyone else has killed each other off. I never played Assassination, but Paul was big into it, and even organized the whole thing as an upperclassman.
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- VISA is the campus group that finds "homes" for Prospies. Hosting a prospie is a volunteer opportunity, and most people never do it. Other people like to do it a lot.
- This cartoon represents my "no period after a sentence if it's at the end of a bubble or panel" phase. It makes me cringe.
- Why does Johnny live in a bus? He's living out the Chris McCandless legend, this time in Iowa. I drew up a backstory later on. Johnny and Dean are working in an autobody shop in Fairbanks one summer, and their boss brings in an old bus that he found in the woods, and tells the boys that they can have the bus if they fix it up in their free time. The boys do this and take off to the lower forty-eight. On 80, they get involved in an altercation (involving a young woman, I'm sure) and duck off the highway in a town called "Grinnell." There, they hide in the cornfields, like pirates hiding in a channel, until the coast is clear. For some reason they decide to go to college, etc., etc. I can't remember all the details of the backstory, but I have the notes around here somewhere.
- The young boy and girl in the funeral crowd are my brother and sister, then ages 11 and 9.
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