Strips 73-76 of the popular comic strip Molarity, which previewed in The Observer in 1977. Who wants to be a campus Casanova?
73. The Observer’s sports headline has the soccer team on a 23-game winning streak while the football team went 0-3 for the first time in history. It did not take much for the “Dump Devine” banners to be hung from dormitory windows. Last year’s National Championship was forgotten.
74. In the days before texting we simply spoke in acronyms and abbreviated words. HTH meant home-town-honey, the girlfriend (often from high school) one left behind. Other abbreviations: vator for elevator; za for pizza. Within dorms, sport programs or majors there was another level of unique jargon. For example, when most of us would “go get a pizza,” Flanner/Arkies would “grip a za.”
75. I caught a lot of heat for this cartoon. Women thought I was saying that all the woman at Notre Dame were unattractive. I was not. I was just saying that unattractive women were unattractive. (Somehow that seemed better to me.) I was regularly self-critical and made just as much fun of guys. I learned that people frequently interpret any character that is a nonwhite-male as being a cartoon about that entire group and not the individual character. Oh, by the way, tattoos were rare and not considered sexy on women back then.
76. The banner headline on this September 29, 1979, Observer was “Pope John Paul I Dies.” This was after a month as being pope. I recall as a sophomore arkie thinking the current Rome class had missed the installation of this pope, but they would get a chance to see the election and installation of the new one.
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.