Art School Confidential: Schmucks

 Here's a blast from the past. For my last two years of high school, I transferred to a vocational commercial art program in the school for rejects. It was the best school EVER! Situated in a quaint downtown(complete with gazebo and soda jerk shop), we students ran that joint. We left every day for lunch. The naughtier kids would go get pizza bagels at the bakery and then smoke their little hearts out behind the courthouse. We goofy kids(my friend Lee especially) would get into all kinds of nonsense capers before heading back to class. Sure, we weren't Spicoli or the Welcome Back Cotter crowd, but I think we had a more stimulating(if slightly less productive) high school experience than the dopes locked up in the traditional learning institutions around.

 Anyhow, for our senior project, Lee and I decided to make our own Weekly World News type tabloid. It was titled Schmucks. It was made cut and paste style with rudimentary word processing typed articles coupled with mangled images culled from the pages of National Geographic and People magazines. This was 1995, mind you, and our school didn't have Windows. This is crude stuff. but we got flying marks on it from our teacher(who even saw fit to show other teachers around the school how we wasted education dollars). She was so proud of us. This here on the right is the ad for a home glue making kit. It shows horses being mangled on a mutated torture device/ home appliance.

 To the left you can see another of our tasteful ads. Our headline stories included "Midget Runs Amok in Mall, Slaughters Zero", "Man Sells House for a Bottle Cap", "World's Tallest Man Chokes to Death on Anteater", and "98 Year Old Ninja Eludes Denver Cops". Along with the ones you see here. It was great fun to make, all the while goofing off, and still receiving A's.

 Other features included Top 10 Flix, with titles such as "Interview With The Bedpan", "Drop Your Pants and Run", and "lazing Puddles".
Top 10 Books, with such literary faire like "Journey to the Center of my Pants", "Assmaster's Greatest Poems", and "Horse Shaving and Home Repair Made Simple".

There was also a personals department. Here is one example:

Divorced White Homosexual Potato. Seeks Keebler Elf, height 3'7". Caramel complexion, body like heaven.

 Top ten music singles of the time included:
"Monkey Urine Blues" by MC Colon
"Shave the Wife, Shoot the Kids" by Bobby Joe Gerbil
"I Lost my Virginity in the Septic Tank" by Hans Auf


Top ten albums were:
"Frozen Assets" by Jerk n Squirt
"Corndog Orgy" by Unibrow
"Go On Your Lawn" by Fecal Beagle

I don't think our teachers really read this all the way through.

Regardless, it helped us further our art careers. Umm, not really. He joined the Coast Guard and I now work retail. But at the time it was the crowning achievement of a two year school stint spent drawing stupid cartoons, breaking shit, and planted the seed of my miscreant creativity of the future. I still laugh reading this thing.