I’ve never been a big fan of sports in general. Big surprise, I know. Part of it has to do with the fact that I was never very good at them. Part of it is the legion of people in my life who take high school athletics too seriously (seriously, if it’s all for fun, why is the coach yelling so much, and why are parents harassing coaches about their kids not getting enough play time?). But mostly, sports just feel so inconsequential to me. Sometimes one team wins. Sometimes it loses. What difference does it make? It’s not like the winners are guaranteed seats in Valhalla, or the losers are boiled in oil. It’s just a game, one that very few people are going to remember years from now. That’s what I tried to make a comic about.
You know, for such a depressing comic, I had a lot of fun drawing this. It brought back a lot of pleasant, goofy memories of playing Middle School basketball, back when everything felt new and there wasn’t so much pressure to succeed. Plus this is my first mixed media comic. I scanned a clipping from the sports section of the Star Tribune to make the background in Panel 5. All in all, this is one of my better strips so far.
