Chris Miller '97
Cartoonist
CHRIS MILLER' 97, creator of "Sleazy the Wonder Squirrel," is the newest member of our ranks. In addition to deity Ted Geisel '25 (aka Dr. Seuss), Big Green Doodlers include Abner Dean '31 (as Abner Epstein, he was all over the campus, later he made it to The New Yorker), Frank Stockman '35 (who drew the famous Jacko dogs), Thomas Ruegger '76, creator of Animaniacs, Steve Kelley '81, editorial cartoonist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, and me. (I have a strip in the newspaper of Capitol Hill, Roll Call, and an occasional sketch in Post.) Of course, rising to prominence in the field of cartooning is not unlike becoming valedictorian at summer school.
What is it about Hanover that molded us into sarcastic sket chers? Miller's answer mirrors my own: material. "You take a bunch of intelligent and talented kids from all over the world and you throw them in the woods," Miller says. "It's a recipe for dysfunction—a pretty cool place to be a cartoonist."
Though the faces change, the topics stay the same. Weak- kneed administrators, pompous professors, an anachronistic Greek system, bipolar social life, fumbling footballers. Says Kelley, "I did cartoons about the campus police, how crappy the food was at Thayer Hall...."
Waitaminute! I thought, remembering one of my own strips that featured Dartmouth Dining Services director Pete Napolitano as an immense canine eating cash and excreting the day's special. And sure enough, a quick flip through the "Sleazy" strips reveals Sleazy having a field day with DDS—peddling spoiled milk as $9 Dartmouth yogurt, for example. "They were an old standby," Miller admits. It is, sir, as I have said, a cheap shot—and yet there are those of us who love it. We've all had a great deal of fun at the expense of others, for the enjoyment (we hope) of the rest of you. We were able to relieve our frustrations through cartooning—probably the most effective medium for ridicule ever invented. Even if Hanover had no campus newspapers, the lot of us probably would have been sketching away in the basements of our dorms. And so we keep doing it.
As a senior, Miller produced two acclaimed animated Sleazy shorts, and he hopes to find work in L.A. as a writer and animator. He's already interned at MAD magazine and helped design aliens for George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic for future Star Wars installments. "Sleazy's on hiatus for now," Miller reports. Speaking for the fans of the latest cartoonist to come out of Hanover, let's hope it's only temporary.
The popular Sleazy is a bigger squirrel than cartoonist Chris Miller.
