Cartoonist Sam Hurt has had a Web presence for ages; I can’t even remember when I first discovered that he was online, but I’m thinking it was sometime in the mid to late 1990s, when I was still endlessly delighted by all the obscure things that you could find on the Web. Fairly soon after that, he started putting some of his wonderful “Queen of the Universe” strips online. “Queen of the Universe” is a great strip, and Peaches is an amazing character, but I was still pining for Eyebeam, the strip that introduced me to Sam Hurt.
“Eyebeam” started a few years before I moved to Austin; it ran daily in the Daily Texan, the student newspaper, which was a pretty decent paper when I lived there in 1984-86. Sam Hurt was a law student, and his eponymous lead character was too—a slightly weird and unconventional law student (and in later strips, a lawyer) with a roommate named Ratliff*, a delightful girlfriend named Sally, and a pet hallucination named Hank. “Eyebeam” was hugely popular in Austin, so much so that Hank was nominated for student government at the University of Texas—and won. Reading “Eyebeam” was something I looked forward to every day. The strips were collected in books, and I bought every one of them as soon as each came out, even though I had read all the strips in them. I still own every single one.
I don’t know exactly what I found so appealing about the strip, but I guess it was the juxtaposition of slightly boho domesticity and everyday routine with flights of utter fancy; I don’t know any other cartoon that features a hallucination, much less a hallucination who has a girlfriend. It was also distinctively Austin-y, and for much of the time that I lived in Austin, I adored the place and its lifestyle, so that worked for me too.
I still find the strips both hilarious and charming, though I have no objectivity about them at all and don’t know if anyone else would see the appeal. But finally, I can invite people to find out for themselves, rather than trying to explain the strip to them, because they’re all online, even some super early ones from when Sam was an undergrad. So go read them all (I recommend starting with 1983 rather than the very early strips). And if you do, be sure to tell me what you think.
*I was fascinated by this, because I had moved to Austin along with a good friend from college, Bill Maxwell, who was taking a year off between college and grad school and had decided to spend that year hanging out in Austin, home of his close friend John Ratliff. I had never encountered the name “Ratliff” before—we don’t grow them in NYC (and this was before Ben Ratliff started writing for the New York Times)—and suddenly there were two of them. I considered this an amazing coincidence, though of course since then I’ve met or heard of all sorts of Ratliffs and Ratcliffes, and it turns out not to be a particularly uncommon name at all. But I was very provincial back then.