Fresh-Man: The First Few Years (Scott Easley, circa 1988).

§ January 20th, 2010 § Filed under from the vast Mikester comic archives § 3 Comments


When I was attending the University of California Santa Barbara, Scott Easley’s Fresh-Man was a welcome part of every Friday’s Daily Nexus, the school’s daily newspaper. Rocketed to UCSB from the doomed planet of Hometawn, young Chaz Kent lives among us as a mild-mannered college student. But, when danger looms, he cries out his magic word (“Werza-Pardee?”) and transforms to the cape-and-underwear clad champion of underclassmen everywhere, Fresh-Man!

The strip was a fun and amusingly drawn strip about college life (for which I, as a young college student, was the ideal audience), with problem roommates, classroom woes, some local UCSB references, and, of course, the occasional supervillain. Man, supervillains were the worst part about going to UCSB, I tell you what.

Speaking of supervillains, Fresh-Man’s arch-nemesis was the dreaded Professor F, seen here in a partial sequence taken from one of the strips:



(Before you say anything, yes, “surprise” is misspelled in that third panel. Hey, let’s see how good your spelling is when you’re in the heat of battle!)

Professor F was based on an actual professor at the college (and who was given a nod, by name, at the beginning of said strip). A year or two later, I found myself taking an English course with this professor, and all I could think about was the fact that he was the inspiration for Professor F, and hoping that was just a humorous exaggeration of his particular grading preferences. As it turned out, I did reasonably well in his class. And yes, his hair did look like that.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this strip, and I’m glad I snapped up this collection from the college bookstore way back when. It’s a nice bit of collegiate nostalgia for me.

Looking at the Amazon listings, there only appears to be one copy for sale, at $49.95. Goodness…that’s a far cry from the $5.95 I dropped on it:


I should note that the book itself has no publication data…no publisher, no year of release, etc. The strip finished its run during (if I recall correctly) my freshman year at UCSB, and I believe the book was published sometime during my sophomore year in 1988. I’m not 100% of that 1988 publication date, but I know it’s certainly not the 1980 date I’ve seen given to it here and there on the internet.

By the way, that little green blob with the tongue at the lower left of the cover? That’s Glorp, some dorm food Fresh-Man’s roommate Oswald brought home and kept as a pet. Again, pretty much an accurate depiction of college life.

3 Responses to “Fresh-Man: The First Few Years (Scott Easley, circa 1988).”