School! A time of learning and fun and completely bizarre events.
I went to college for Comics and Visual Storytelling - it could have been a better program than it was, but I learned a bunch and met a lot of new friends, so it wasn't all a waste of two years.
Some things were, um, odd, though.
Like the head teacher who was addicted to morphine for the entirety of my 2-year acquaintance with him. He'd broken his thumb in a motorcycle accident several years prior, but it hadn't healed right, and his right hand was in constant pain - so he popped a lot of morphine-based pills. It made him a bit, uh, weird. On good days, he'd be upbeat and excited and a get-things-done-now kind of guy - but also desperately unfocused and scatterbrained. I had a guidance-meeting with him once which lasted 15 minutes, 2 of which he spent talking about my schoolwork, and 13 of which he spent trying to draw on a piece of paper and constantly apologising for being bad at it.
He'd also break off lectures and lessons to tell everybody about that one time he and his friend tried to join the French Foreign Legion. He once gave me a cheap, plastic toy gun he found in a drawer somewhere. Why? Nobody knows.
On bad days, he'd get upset at the slightest thing, break lessons off early, and be very petty about disagreements. If you said ANYTHING that contradicted him, he'd lower your grades.
There was another teacher who was deeply, deeply obsessed with two things - Carl Barks and the Bayeux Tapestry. He'd constantly veer off topic in any given class to bring either - or both! - of those things up. We had a lecture on Will Eisner once, which ended up with him talking about the Bayeux Tapestry instead.
Let's see, what else...?
Oh, right! I had one classmate who was making very serious attempts at becoming an alcoholic. We tried to rein him in, but it wasn't much use. He'd get blackout drunk, then wake up in the morning, stumble to the bathroom and stare at himself in the mirror, wondering why on earth his entire face was covered in blood. He never did figure out why, though he guessed that he'd faceplanted on a sidewalk somewhere while stumbling home. He'd also sometimes pull all-nighters for so many nights in a row that he started hallucinating; once, he thought invisible people were following him through a park, talking about how they were going to kill him.
... We did actually manage to convince him to go home and go to sleep when that happened.
I also had another classmate who I think completed TWO assignments in two years, and only came to school to sit around the studio and talk loudly about yaoi. She survived on a steady diet of rice crackers and Nutella spread. For serious. I stopped by her apartment once to pass on some textbooks, and she had a pyramid of Nutella-jars in her kitchen taller than I was.
There was also that one classmate who had a.) a perfect unibrow, and b.) no sense of scepticism whatsoever. If you spoke in an earnest enough tone and kept a straight face, you could fool him into believing anything. I took it upon myself to always be honest with him and tell him when someone had lied to him, but seriously. The boy believed the most outrageous things - like that the entirety of the internet was kept on a single server beneath Nevada - and was the sweetest, kindest person I knew. ... Who also drew the most ridiculously gory comic strips ever. Not out of any wish to shock people, but because he genuinely seemed to think that jokes about slaughtering pigs on kitchen tables were the funniest thing in the world.
We had a big old whiteboard in our studio that was a constantly evolving piece of art. Once, it was adorned with a quite glorious-looking Optimus Prime with a terrible human face, wearing a Sailor Scout-outfit and Indiana Jones' hat and whip, fighting an interdimensional penguin with a lazer-gun. That's not artschool-weird, though - that's just regular-people-weird.
Our school was located in what used to be a military base, and the comics-studios were located in the basement (yay for no natural light whatsoever) behind a couple of blast-doors thicker than my arm. Cellphone reception was non-existent, and the air-con never worked and we were never allowed to open the single window we had. If the entire class was there at any one time, you started to run out of properly oxygenated air in a couple of hours, and it made you incredibly sleepy.
Ah school. I miss you sometimes.
ETA: I forgot about that one time two of my classmates agreed to pull an all-nighter at the school studio, but one of them forgot about it and never showed up, so the other one drew an angry comic-strip and put it on the absentminded guy's desk! It was supposed to be a one-off thing, but grew into a 100+ page round robin comic that soon involved pretty much every classmate we had - including me - and evolved from a cartoony "I can't believe you let me down!"-premise to a bizarre shounen-manga-meets-videogames adventure. I remember drawing myself smoking two cigars at the same time and dual-wielding AK47s as I did battle with a bucktooth unicorn (who was secretly just someone in a unicorn-mechsuit) being ridden into battle by a friend of mine who had turned evil because we'd forgotten to buy her coffee.
It was like an injoke, only larger and with a lot more work put into it.
This was the cover of chapter one, if that tells you anything about the comic:
