Strips 130-134 of the popular comic Molarity, which previewed in The Observer in 1977, take on printer problems, porn and gambling. Just another week in the Molarity universe.
130. After the printer ran a number of cartoons in the wrong order, I drew this one. FYI: I always drew the cartoon on an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of letter paper, vertically. Early on The Observer decided to run them as a strip. So The Observer staff or the printer offsite would shoot the cartoon, and cut and place it on the boards. I guess sometimes they got careless.
131. With this cartoon I tried to rub in the whole cartoon panels out-of-order thing. The heading on page 92 of the ND directory (back when they printed phone books) was some obscene combination that I cannot recall today.
132. The cover of this Observer had Phil Donahue appearing at Washington Hall. The corner heading was a dull “…sports trivia — page 8.” You have to recall that when my cartoon appeared, pornography was not available on computers and smart phones everywhere. You had to walk five miles in the snow, uphill both ways, to get smut.
133. The cover of this Observer had Father Hesburgh appearing on the Phil Donahue show. In previous cartoons I explained the laundry service they used to provide to men’s dorms. Someone asked me if I was saying Jim was a cross-dresser. I was not.
134. In this Observer , page 14 appeared on page 3, so printer problems continued and the first two panels of my cartoon on the misplaced page 14 were reversed. Mardi Gras at Notre Dame was a weeklong casino in Stepan Center. This was before Indian or riverboat casinos were common and before the local bishop decided gambling was not a great way for a Catholic university to prepare for Lent. The Mardi Gras booth in the third panel was the Grace-Lewis booth. Our theme was Dante’s Inferno, so I designed the booth to look like hell.
See the first five classic strips. Check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips. Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, also is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives.