FOR THE PAST four summers I've worked at the Kiddie Country Day Care Center in Burke, Virginia. We've drawn treehouses, gone on treasure hunts, played Game Boy Advance video games, created amusement park brochures and played some of the most epic hide-and-go-seek games ever. If you read the comic strip that I drew for the past four years, Second Nature, you might recognize a lot of these real-life adventures as cartoon storylines.
Actually, most Second Nature events were somehow inspired by my so-called "job." The character Popsy is named after a first grader named Papsi and started out as a construction paper monkey decoration I made for our classroom. Stories I told about a kung-fu cat called "Meow Meow Ka-Pow" during breaks at the swimming pool became the character of Stray. Every day at Kiddie Country provided a thousand comic ideas.
Playing with my younger sister Sarah helped too. One day we were going through a box of old toys in her room who had been replaced by the Barbie minivan. From the bottom of the box, I pulled out a small Happy Meal mouse and a rubber lizard from the National Zoo. These guys eventually became the characters Squeak-Squeak and Mr. Lizard, who Sarah and I still play with when I come home for breaks.
A few years ago at Kiddie Country, Michael Marteeny brought in a collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics (Second Nature's biggest influence). When I saw him and his friends laughing at the same things that I would laugh at, it became a goal for my comic. If I could make both kids and adults smile at the beginning of their day, that's when I felt successful. The best compliment I ever received was a call from my second-grade teacher about how she and her children read Second Nature online.
Creating the world of Ashley, Billy and Cameron (A-B-C) was an excuse for me to be a kid again. Looking back at some of the older strips, it's amazing how much the characters and drawings have changed, but since day one I knew how the story would end. I wanted to reveal that both Ashley and Cameron had the same seasonal friends and I wanted to use proper capitalization for the first time (a subtle sign of their growing up). In the meantime, I tried to take the "naive kid/talking animal" comic beyond its cliches and into fresh, different and imaginative stories. There are 446 Second Nature comics, all permanently archived at dave2n.com if you want to take a look back in a few years.
Second Nature the comic is over. If it made you remember what it was like to be a kid at least once and maybe laugh a few times, that's all I really wanted. If Second Nature were ever to continue one day, I'd tell the parallel story from Ashley's point of view. But I also want to do so many different things: Write and illustrate children's books, become a teacher, build a treehouse, become a rockstar... these are my dreams. Drawing a comic strip was one of them. I can't wait to see what's next.
(Dave Werner was 1999-2002 graphics editor and 1998-2002 cartoonist.)
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