“That was probably the worst idea you’ve ever had…and yet it worked.”

I never pass up an opportunity to say that to Michael. I like to tell myself that he just got lucky, and was foolish to trust to that. I hope I’m right, but I wonder how much of it is envy, since things worked out for him where they didn’t for me.

********

Let me explain.

I first met Michael in college. He was one of those wide-eyed idealist types, you know? The kid who never grew up, who never learned anything about the real world and how it works?

He had been drawing all his life. He read the Sunday comics in the newspaper, and started out imitating those. By the time I met him, he was drawing his own comic strip.

When we met, I assumed it was just a hobby. His comics were all in pencil (sometimes colored pencil), done amateurishly (even if I liked his drawing style), and he didn’t even try to get them published, even as he was eager to show them to anyone who would read them.

Even the subject matter was uninspired: a boy and his dog—except the dog walks on two legs and talks. The boy is a boring bookworm who never emotes, while the dog is fascinated by everything, but naïve, and continually annoys the boy without meaning to.

But as I got to know the guy, I realized it was more than just a hobby. He said “A hobby’s supposed to pass the time, not fill it.” (Not until years later did I learn that he was quoting Norman Bates from Psycho—I would have worried all the more had I known that at the time.) It was an obsession with him. He tried to draw a comic every day, and sometimes he did more than one a day.

I asked Michael his major. He said he didn’t have one. Now I really pitied the poor guy, having no idea what to do with his life. I suggested that he major in something likely to provide him with a steady income, that would facilitate his drawings. He couldn’t think of anything.

I already knew my own major: Special Education. When I was little I was diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, and I wanted to help kids like I had been. I knew that teachers were underpaid, but I reasoned that my experience would make me a desirable hire.

Michael had no interest in being a teacher. I asked if he was interested in anything other than drawing. He said “Dinosaurs.” I asked if he’d considered being a paleontologist. He said, “Yeah, like I’ve considered being a knight-errant.” I suggested that he might consider a Geology major. He categorically refused: his dad was a geologist, but rocks just bored him.

********

So it went during our freshman year. Michael was drifting, while I knew my own future.

Then, as the fall semester of our sophomore year was ending, Michael told me he was considering majoring in Biology. He was still drawing his comic, so I assumed he wanted to study dogs, maybe be a veterinarian.

He looked surprised at the idea, and said no. He had no interest in any kind of medical career. No, he said he wanted to be a paleontologist and natural history museum curator. He’d always loved dinosaurs, he said.

“…You do know dinosaurs are extinct, right?”

What he said shocked me, even as he’d said shocking things before. “Can you prove it?”

I thought, This guy’s lost. But he made an argument that I couldn’t refute, not without appealing to the authority of expert scientists: he said that the only way to be certain that dinosaurs were extinct was to search every single spot on earth and fail to find the least evidence of a living dinosaur.

I had nothing to say to that. I still insisted that dinosaurs were extinct, and that you couldn’t study dinosaurs with a Biology degree. But I didn’t sound very convincing, and he didn’t listen.

Meanwhile I was focusing on my Special Education major.

********

After two years, Michael and I got our Associates Degrees. Mine was in Special Education; his was in Biology.

Michael stuck with his Biology major through the fall semester of his junior year. I had to give the guy credit: he was no quitter. I thought maybe he’d find something in the field that he was interested in, and could make a career out of.

Then came the spring semester.

That semester, Michael had to take Organic Chemistry II as part of his required courses. He stuck with the course through the semester, but he kept complaining about how hard it was. And in the end, he flunked—didn’t get the credit for the course.

Michael was very emotional as summer came. He said he’d looked at the grades he’d gotten ever since he came to college, and his worst grades were those in his required courses. The courses he was taking towards his Biology major were the least interesting to him.

I told him I was very sorry, but I said that the time for making the decision was past. Now he had to stick with it—he was so close to getting his Bachelor’s degree, and it was too late to start a new major. If he tried, he’d graduate late. I knew he’d never do it: he wasn’t a quitter.

That’s when Michael had probably the worst idea he’d ever had: he switched majors.

Worse, he switched to a Graphic Design major—because one of the Graphic Design courses was a Cartooning course.

I tried to talk him out of it. There was no way to get steady income from cartooning, not without sacrificing your own creativity for whatever your boss wants you to draw—something I knew wouldn’t sit well with him.

But he was out of ideas. He refused to continue in a major where Organic Chemistry II was a required course. I told him he’d be a starving artist—if he didn’t sell out.

He didn’t listen.

Poor guy.

********

I was right. By the time I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in Special Education, Michael still had two semesters to go before he could get his degree in Graphic Design.

But once I graduated, I found it very difficult to apply for a job. I had assumed I would be a highly desirable hire, but I wasn’t. The few people who had heard of me didn’t have any teaching jobs open. Suddenly I found myself feeling as though my entire academic career had failed to prepare me for the professional world. That fall, for the first time ever, when I filled out a form, I wrote under “Occupation” the dreaded word:

“Unemployed.”

Michael was very sympathetic to me in those days. He suggested that I follow my own passion: singing. But I had seen too much of what happened to professional singers. Screwed by their managers and recording companies, always on the road and never seeing their families, getting high on drugs and meaningless sex—no thank you.

Michael pointed out that I was never happier than when I was singing, just like he was never happier than when he was drawing. I didn’t listen, especially since he was a year behind in college.

I keep telling myself I was right not to listen.

********

A year later, Michael graduated from college with a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design. Now he’d learn the hard way what I’d learned.

But no—after only a couple of false starts, Michael got a job with a syndicate as a cartoonist. He had already been submitting his comic strip, “Peter and Freddy”, to the school paper, and it had proved very popular. Long before I assumed he’d be writing “Unemployed” on forms, he was publishing “Peter and Freddy” professionally in a couple of newspapers.

I knew it wouldn’t last.

********

It lasted. Not only did “Peter and Freddy” spread into many newspapers in many locations, but he spun off two new comics which were similarly successful (though just as uninspired).

What’s more, he made a move into webcomics. He was a gamer, and he found a like-minded gaming community online that became an early audience for his first webcomic, “El Mapache” (about a masked vigilante crime fighter with a raccoon motif).

Most recently, Michael achieved his lifelong dream, his magnum opus: he published a graphic novel online, which then got published in book form. “The Evening of the Land” is a doorstopper, at 1000 pages. It’s an epic fantasy on the order of The Lord of the Rings, only in a world of anthropomorphic animals. And it’s proving very successful: I even hear he keeps getting offers for movie deals, though he isn’t interested. At least, not unless it’s on his terms—and he can afford to say that now.

As for me? I’ve been unemployed for the last fifteen years. My parents still let me live with them, but the world around me has changed so rapidly, and I haven’t been able to keep up. I wonder if this is how military people feel when they return to civilian life—or how prisoners feel when their jail sentences end and they go free.

I still don’t know what to do.

********

Every time I meet Michael Hawthorn, I make a point of bringing up how he changed majors in college.

“That was probably the worst idea you’ve ever had…and yet it worked.”

THE END