Earl Counter: 112 Strips
Table of contents
Earl the Squirrel Year One
Earl #1
Weekly Funnies
Earl #2
Earl the Squirrel Year One
The Beginning.
About the Strip: For a long time this was the only strip to actually run in The Flat Hat. The second strip below was sent in following a power outage on campus. It was never published, I suspect due to the fact that it was attached to the same email as the first and went unnoticed. From then on, a fear that I had missed some sort of (imagined) deadline on production for Earl kept me from sending more strips in.
About this Strip: This is the first strip we see Earl talk! Initially I didn’t want him to be able to speak (à la Garfield) but I decided he could talk to animals just to deliver this punchline. He’s really cockblocking here!
About the Strip: This was the last strip in the initial era of Earl the Squirrel. Due to time constraints I stopped making them. It really became a lot to manage. This wasn’t my concept or layout, and I had really given up at this point.
Also worth noting I was working on paper about 4x the size of the paper used in more modern strips. The next strip is unique because it was produced on paper half the size of the previous ones and twice the size of the next set. I only had a ballpoint pen to make it.
About a year after the end of Earl’s first run, I returned to the drawing board to revive Earl the Squirrel for the modern era. These strips were given to The Flat Hat who ran the first on their website and the others in print.
About the Strip: Earl is a prophet. People will come up to me and say “this happened to my buddy Eric,” and that means I’ve done my job. The intent for many of these strips was to appeal to a college student audience, and I think I may have done it. Ironically, this strip happened to me about 2 months after it’s creation. I was ID’d by an officer who stopped me walking down the sidewalk, believing I was intoxicated. Next strip should be Earl dating a bunch of hot babes! That would be cool!
About the Strip: He speaks! To a person! This is the final phase of Earl being, for most intents and purposes, entirely human. He’s treated like a person, he’s enrolled in classes, and he can speaks English.
About the Strip: The Jefferson squirrel incident. A horror we must never forget. A couple guys at Jefferson hall killed a campus squirrel with a blow dart gun (tube?) and left the skinned carcass, brining in a plastic bag of milk, in the dorm fridge. A stunned resident happened upon the tragic rodent victim and called the police. The rest is history. This strip was made long ago in the first run of Earl the Squirrel but eventually I stopped scanning the strips and either threw away or gave away the original art. I recreated it here, after I, by chance (or was it fate?), met the alumni responsible for the senseless tragedy at a football game. Never Forget!
About the Strip: Not my best work.
About the Strip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools Cow Tools
Earl the Squirrel #1.
About the Strip: https://comicbookclub.pages.wm.edu/earl-the-squirrel-1-in-context/
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
About the Strip: This strip is a reference to John T. McCutcheon’s pulitzer prizing winning political cartoon, “A Wise Economist asks a Question.” The strip featured a man, labeled, “Victim of Bank Failure,” remarking that he had saved money for hard times, unlike a squirrel assumes. Squirrels of course stockpile food, and the comic ironically implies that the squirrel is a wise economic advisor. My comic is much more intelligent. William and Mary’s new PATH registration system doesn’t give everyone the classes they need because it (like all registration systems) does not work well. Earl being called a “Wise Academic Advisor” is funny because it implies that he is as wise as any real academic advisor. I’m calling them stupid. Not mine though, he’s great.
About the Strip: Not canon… Unless…
Earl50
About the Strip: Zack Benson, the biggest John Denver fan I know, requested this strip Freshman year. What’s the joke? The joke is that he is a rabbit and therefore wouldn’t have a student ID. Why was he in line at the dining hall? I have no idea. Why did he think to get his tribe card? You’d have to ask Zack, which I encourage. See, Zack would never let this strip die, year after year he would return to the whiteboard to pitch this strip to me and the club. My promise was that if the club wanted me to make it, I would. Well, despite nobody ever getting the joke without Zack’s explanation (seriously, not even once), and then people often still not getting it, the club decided that the world needed this comic. I do (regrettably) have to admit that now that I’ve seen it polished, it is kinda funny.
Weekly Funnies
This is my last semester at WM so you can expect to see a new humorous Earl strip every Monday around 12:00 on the Instagram. These are those strips but in one place. Follow @wmcomicbookclub on instagram.
Earl the Squirrel #2
Chapter One
Chapter Two
To Not Be Continued…
The response to this arc was lukewarm at best. I still really like it, and I probably would’ve kept it going if it seemed like anyone else would’ve cared. Honestly, Earl1 was supposed to set up this story, which I was more excited about. I think I probably need to work my way up to a story like this, but don’t be surprised if you see me recycle this plot in the future. I still think this was probably my best work on the strip. I already know how this story goes, so there’s no point in telling it if nobody else wants to hear it.
Ricky Rain was a character I designed back in high school, so I was very excited to finally find a place for him. At one point, years ago, I started work on a Ricky Rain solo comic strip set in the future. It never materialized but I left the button that would’ve linked to the strip in the “comics we make” section on this website, just for fun.
Travis Talk
Extras
Earl the Squirrel is about to celebrate his 50th strip so I figured I’d include some extras and history of the comic, which is so obviously destined to become one of the all time great comic strips.
Inception (not the movie)
Earl was born for two reasons, neither being artistic inspiration.
Reason 1: I draw in my classes. It looks enough like taking notes that sometimes the professor doesn’t notice. This method is used in “no-laptop” classes so that I can still avoid paying attention without getting in trouble. In my lecture I hall I was drawing superheroes, over and over. Superheroes are all buff men, and I had just drawn a shirtless Thor at the beach, so to put to rest the notion that I was queer for the attractive women seated behind me, I created Earl. Those girls were, of course, immediately impressed by my amazing squirrel illustration, and satisfied with my apparent heterosexuality. (Ok, there weren’t any girls, I just didn’t want to look gay in front of the guys behind me, happy?)
Reason 2: A year after Earl’s design, my friend scored an internship in his niche interest, pinball. Part of me was jealous, but mostly I was inspired. Not only was someone my age starting a career in their seemingly impossible dream, it was someone I knew personally. Suddenly, my pipe dream of making comics seemed possible. If he could do it, could I?
Soon, I sent the first Earl into the school paper, and the rest was history.
About Me
I’m Toby, and I made all of this stuff. Aside from some story inputs on the early Earl strips, and a short strip I made with Jacob (King of Comics) everything was made by me. I made this website, the comics, the deep dives into comics history… I also (regrettably) made some youtube videos that I hope nobody ever finds.
I grew up loving comics, but maybe the more appropriate term for my relationship with comics is obsession. In order to really get into the medium, there’s a certain degree of obsession I think I needed to have. In comics, unlike film and literature, there’s no academic system designed to validate and intellectualize your love of the medium. Sure, sometimes a teacher will want to be ‘the cool teacher’ and give their students ‘Watchmen,’ or ‘Maus,’ but they never really dig deep into the history of the form. In an academic setting, comics are rarely more than a tolerated novelty.
More importantly, growing up loving comics, there was nobody to talk to about it. I was stuck ranting to my (very patient) family, about how exciting the medium was. People who deeply love movies have their circles, people who really love books have theirs, comic book fans are something of a rarity. Whether that’s because comics are prohibitively expensive, often confusing, or because the fanbase is a mess of insufferable, continuity obsessed, gatekeepers… who knows? Sure there were communities online, but there was nobody at school to talk to about this stuff. Nobody at home who could match my excitement. It felt kinda isolating to be the only chill comic book fan.
Even though, when I talked comics, I was frequently (and respectfully) asked to stop, I didn’t Maybe, honestly, the perceived lack of recognition helped fuel my obsession. I really felt like I was wading in uncharted waters, where anything was possible. In so many other fields, it feels like everything’s been done, but in comics I feel like I have something new to add. How often do you really get to feel like you’re doing something unique?
So I made all of this stuff. I was sick of having nobody to talk to, so I made a club to seek out and create likeminded fans, and give them the inclusive and social space I would’ve killed for.
I worked with the library to create a new ‘Graphic Novel’ section, and I made sure the club was as engaging as I knew how to make it, and I’m really proud of what it turned into. It’s the achievement I’m most proud of across my college career. (And I can say that now, in my last semester(ish).)
How it’s Made
Initially Earl was made on gigantic paper, I wanna say 18x24inches. I wanted to include the club (who I had been trying to motivate to make comics for quite some time) so I decided we could write and plot the strips together and I would draw them. This went on for a while, before the club’s interest waned, and my free time dwindled towards the end of the semester.
A lot of these jokes ended up happening, but accidentally. ‘Earlpoint Paradox’ is like the arc with Ricky Rain. The frat stuff happened. I ended up making a class-registration strip. Still have to do ‘Crisis on Infinite Earls’ and I have no idea what ‘Munroe POOPY’ was all about. This whiteboard actually appears in the back of one of Earl’s classrooms.
Sometimes, I’ll do some photo collage work to patch together some backgrounds or foreground elements. It’s a lot easier for me to make things in modules that can be stacked or remixed if needed. Probably a mindset I brought over from computer science.
Bonus Bits
I finished my Operating Systems final early and was too scared to leave the room. Every time someone got up to leave, the professor kept running his finger down the line of their test answers and then shaking his head in disappointment. I think the class average was like a %25 or something. Computer Science.
Sometimes, if I got my hands on the school paper when there was an Earl the Squirrel running, I’d throw in a bonus joke.
There were additional jokes in the margins of the original Earl art. Sometimes they would make it into later strips.
Earl the Squirrel… Chronological Order.
This is the definitive chronological Earl the Squirrel reading order.
This is not how Earl was meant to be read, but have fun.
Under Construction ^