To quote that band half my pals listened to nonstop back in the day, “What a long, strange trip it’s been…”
So it was 30 years ago this week that I started drawing a daily comic strip for The Daily Mississippian in my final year of university. Jip premiered on August 20, 1993 and ran for just about a year, 140 or so daily episodes of college hijinks heavily inspired by Doonesbury, Bloom County and Martin Wagner’s Hepcats.
I’ve written about my Jip days before and republished the strips as free PDF downloads a couple years back. (Advertorial: You can get Book 1 here and Book 2 here!) But, unlike my other comic Amoeba Adventures, I’ve never really returned to Jip in the years since I graduated – you can’t go back to college, after all.
Still, when I realised this week marked a whopping three decades since it kicked off, I couldn’t help but wonder what my wide-eyed dog-faced college freshman Jip would be up to in the strange world of 2023 – so here’s a special anniversary strip! If only we knew then what the future held…
Nik Dirga 