Phil, Week 1-Camp

These were the first Phil comics to appear in The Daily Campus, UConn's newspaper.

Phil was created by Ben Vigeant about ten years ago, while Ben was in Middle School. Since then, Phil's been through some pretty drastic transformation. It started as an innocent little comic, then in High School, it became an outlet for awkward nerd rage, and in college, it warped into a bizarre and dark comic strip enjoyed by Ben and his friends down at the University of Mary Washington. Soon after that, however, Ben found himself a little too pre-occupied with school and studies, and put Phil on the back burner for a while.

Meanwhile, at UConn, I was having some issues of my own. The stresses of writing a comic for the Daily Campus was taking its toll; my cartoon Randal's Bar took me so long to draw, I was fired for missing too many deadlines, and my next cartoon, Slick Slack, slowly deteriorated into a soap-box preach-fest. I ended Slick Slack in Spring 07, with every intention of returning to the comics page, but with no idea how.

I casually mentioned this to Ben during the summer break; "I'd love to do another comic for the paper, but I need something that I don't really have to write, something without too much stress on the artwork." To which, Ben responded, "How about Phil?" So started Phil's ascension into The Daily Campus. Ben and I would brainstorm ideas, Ben would write out the scripts, and I would draw the comics.

It has been the most divisive cartoon I've ever been a part of, and it's been the most enthusiastically received up at UConn, possibly because of this. A lot of people try to explain Phil; maybe it's Anti-Humor, maybe it's Ironic. Maybe these are true, but I think Ben and I are getting far too much credit. We wrote Phil because we thought it was funny; it made us laugh. There's not too much more to it than that.

I won't be posting every Phil ever on this blog, just a few that really resonate, for good or bad. The ones reproduced on top were done without Ben's involvement at all; I realized when I got to campus, we'd need a shortened week, only two comics, not the usual three. I guess it represents the early days of this Phils' incarnation; dry dry dry. It wouldn't be until a little later on that we started having some weird fun with obscure Presidents and long storylines.

In the meantime, hope you enjoy these very, very dry comics.