The Birth of Chester the Lobster

Nearing the end of his second semester at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, freshman Mark Bursic responded to an advertisement in the school newspaper. The staff was looking for someone to create a weekly editorial cartoon strip.

He was ‘hired’ on the spot and since they needed something immediately, Mark volunteered to create a hand drawn strip called Someplace Else. It ran for a couple weeks until the end of the school year.

Mark, being both a cartoonist a personal computer enthusiast, had been working on some digital cartooning since high school. During summer break he started working on a new idea, a fully digitally produced cartoon strip that he could deliver to the newspaper as a digital file.

Mark had considered a career as a cartoonist and had studied how they were produced. As was common in 1988, Mark went to the library and researched how artists approached their craft. At that time it was all hand drawn panels. Some of the larger companies like Disney and Marvel had ways of duplicating and sharing pictures, but mostly it was just a guy sitting in front of a drawing board. Mark thought if he could draw the cartoons on the computer he could make a library of images that he could reuse and manipulate. 

Mark pitched his new strip idea to the incoming Editor-in-Chief, Brenda Debias. Brenda was impressed with Mark’s work and decided to let him explore this new strip idea, however there was one problem. The newspaper wasn’t fully computerized and did things mostly by hand with layout boards, halftone images,  text printouts and a waxing machine.

So Mark convinced the secretary of the Student Life office to print his strip using their professional level Hewlett Packard Laser Printer. In return Mark helped the staff including then Assistant Dean of Student Life Bruce Hasselrig with some computer design work.

Mark delivered the first comic strip in August and it was published on September 7th 1988 in Volume 60, Issue 2. The strip ran regularly until Mark was elected Editor-In-Chief in 1990, when he took a break from cartooning.