The creators of the Caltech comic Crippling Depression, from left, Ben Lee, Mike Yeh, and Tim Wan, find humor in campus predicaments, including sleepless nights, dateless weekends, domineering mothers, and Ditch Day.

COMIC RELIEF
By Rhonda Hillbery

For two years in more than 200 comic strips, Crippling Depression has followed three cartoon Techers through the travails of campus politics, problem sets, midterms, dating doldrums, and student-government-led doughnut jaunts.

It’s an impressive run for a venture that originated over idle talk among friends in early 2001. Although the recent graduation of two of its creators seems to have brought the strip’s days to a close, it can still be read on the Web and has been collected into a book. Who would have thought anything that long-lasting could have come from wishful conversations fueled by burgers and fries at Wolfe Burgers on nearby Lake Avenue?

“A lot of times we’d sit around and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had, say, a big screen TV? Wouldn’t it be cool if we had a comic strip?’” recalls one of the creators, Tim Wan, a graduating senior in engineering and applied science.

As the notion of a comic strip started to gel for Tim and Ben Lee, a senior in electrical and computer engineering, an obvious problem emerged. Neither could draw. They asked a friend, Mike Yeh, who rooms with Ben, to work up some sketches. Thus began Crippling Depression.

Full of politically incorrect references and inside jokes about Caltech rituals, even the strip’s name has drawn criticism. The authors say they do not take the idea of depression lightly. Instead, the dire-sounding title is meant as a touch of hyperbole. “It’s a silly name for a comic strip in an undergraduate publication,” Ben says. “It fits in with the desperation students feel but it’s not entirely serious. It’s for fun.”

The setting: Three Tech undergrads deprived of sleep and dates who just happen to have the names Tim, Ben, and Mike. Add to the mix a skeptical female sidekick, Eilene.

In comic-strip style, our heroes’ large heads seem to tower over small childlike bodies. Artist Mike, who will be a senior in electrical engineering, calls himself a former high-school doodler who never received formal art instruction.

During an interview in Tim’s room, which is littered with the usual student clutter, plus dozens of action figures and Disney icons like the title character from the Little Mermaid, and Woody from Toy Story, the cartoonists, all residents of Lloyd House, share laughs and frequently finish one another’s sentences.

Crippling Depression’s debut in the campus student newspaper, the California Tech, coincided with Tim and Ben’s digging out from under a slew of completed core-curriculum requirements. “It was sophomore year, right?” Tim says. “We had to do all this physics. I didn’t see why I had to learn it. All this math. For me, personally, it was, like, I was taking courses that had nothing to do with my major.”

Adds Ben, “I had at least one problem set to do every single night.” At two or more hours each, many nights were spent on problem sets instead of sleep. “It wasn’t the happiest time.”
But rather than wallow in self-pity, they decided to indulge in something more fun. Parody. Of the Institute and of themselves. As Ben describes it, “Crippling Depression is kind of based on the observation that funny things happen around here, and, wouldn’t it be fun to profit from it?”

He sure isn’t speaking in monetary terms. For their labors (they estimate that they spent three to six hours a week on the writing and drawing), Tim, Ben, and Mike each earned all of $10 each a week; barely enough to cover a modest junk-food run to the campus convenience store.

In the best tradition of satire, the Crippling Depression strips tend to exaggerate the everyday difficulties of student life. Almost nothing is immune from a good ribbing—not house life, campus politics, tough professors (Professor Doom), or sadistic TAs. President Baltimore appears clutching a sack of cash in each hand in strips parodying student fee increases or other campus controversies.

This being an equal-opportunity endeavor, the cartoonists also delve into lots of self-parody. “Sometimes it’s just what’s going on in our lives,” Tim says.

That includes making fun of Tim’s love of toys, superheroes, and Disney-land. The strip also mines dating territory: Mike is depicted as too busy studying to spend time with his girlfriend, and our heroes regularly bemoan the dating challenges at a campus where males outnumber females 3-to-1.

At the same time, underlying the humor is a real vein of angst. “A lot of people here think the stress here is so bad it’s gotta be better anywhere else,” Ben says. “But I don’t know if that’s true.”

They didn’t have to do a hard sell to get the strip into the California Tech. Mike says, “The Tech is desperate for ideas.” What campus paper isn’t, especially at a school where spare time is scarce?

There were a few early controversies. On one occasion the cartoonists declined to publish a strip that a Tech editor first wanted President Baltimore to approve. Another time they were called into Dean of Students Jean-Paul Revel’s office over the strip’s blunt characterization of a student representative who goes on doughnut runs.

Although they had wanted to point up the irony of the student government’s highest office-holder being perceived first and foremost as a doughnut deliverer, their use of a certain word (rhymes with witch) offended some readers.

However, after the first few months of publication, Crippling Depression wove itself into the campus landscape. The cartoonists say that as long as they met their deadlines, they were pretty much left alone.

Although the strip’s primary focus has been the antics of its three, mostly clueless, males, Eilene, the main female character, serves as a foil for the protagonists’ often-foolish schemes to get dates. “Originally Eilene was supposed to be a lot of different girls and eventually it got to the point where she sort of developed her own personality characteristics,” Ben says.

Tim rattles off those traits. “She was antiguy. She wouldn’t go out with us. She was sort of mean to us.”

Later, she was joined by another female character, June, who was really happy to be at Caltech and couldn’t understand how anyone could feel otherwise.

Another female character, “Tim’s Mom,” originated during a week when the authors were stymied for topics. But then, she, too, took on a life of her own. In later strips, she embarrasses Tim in stereotypical “Asian mother” fashion, openly assessing female students’ hip girth in terms of their potential for childbirth and asking about her son’s clean underwear supply.

“Yeah, my mom’s really like that,” claims Tim, adding that Mrs. Wan has the strips immortalizing her framed and hanging on the wall of her home.

Other recurring themes have included a guide to sleeping during lectures, student on-campus parking woes, budget cutbacks resulting in higher student fees, and prefrosh weekend—the annual ritual in which high school seniors who have been admitted make a campus pilgrimage to help decide the major question of whether they should attend Caltech.

Yet another strip, entitled “Crazy Old Dean,” lampoons Caltech’s dean of students, Jean-Paul Revel, and his words of wisdom to students. “We parody his penchant for using odd metaphors,” says Ben.

The dean has become one of the cartoon’s biggest fans, and in a recently published Tech column, he laments its demise. “Tell me it is not so. Please. It has been wonderful to follow the peregrinations of those wonderful Charlie Brown–like Techers. It has brought many a warm feeling of recognition, brought many smiles to our faces even when we saw them struggling with Caltechian adversity. You know, the ratio, the insane load, the food, in short, the life here.” As for his own portrayal, Revel says, “I really did enjoy the weekly, well, nearly so, roast.”

Although the strip is clearly meant for a Caltech audience, it has struck a responsive chord with students from all over the country, most of whom have discovered it through word-of-mouth. Despite the Caltech-centric material, readers find similarities to their own college experiences. “They relate to it somehow. They appreciate seeing someone else suffering,” Ben says, chuckling.

Comments have come in from across the country, from as far away as That Other Institute of Technology, where an undergrad reader called the weekly strips “some of the funniest and most original cartoons that I have ever come across,” as well as from Georgia Tech (“It’s not that much different [here] from what y’all go through. Must be some kind of nationwide conspiracy”), and even from Caltech undergrad parents, one of whom wrote, “My wife and I are the proud parents of a current Techie and seeing her life and experiences as seen in your characters really cracked us up.”

As for the Caltech authors, enough time has passed since their core curriculum days that even they look back on that era with a sense of nostalgia. “As a senior now I look back with rose-colored glasses. It wasn’t so bad,” Ben says with a smile. “You never want to ask an upperclassman about what taking a class was like a year or two ago. You want to ask them right after they have taken the class.”

Now that Tim and Ben’s graduation has brought the days of Crippling Depression to a close, what’s next? Tim will be taking a job at Microsoft this summer, while Ben expects to study computer engineering in graduate school at UC Santa Barbara. Mike will finish his senior year majoring in electrical and computer engineering at Caltech.

The trio’s credo to never take anything too seriously applies to their attitude about the strip itself. They’ve self-published a limited-edition volume—500 copies or so—of their collected strips. Beyond that, they say, they are ready to move on.

“We don’t have as many ideas as we used to,” Ben says. “I mean how many more ways can we show how hard it is here?”

Crippling Depression officially said goodbye in the California Tech on April 30, under the title Crippling Reflections. Revisiting the major themes of the past two years, the full-page farewell included caricatures of frosh camp, late-night studying, first TFM (Total Food Management) meal, Chem 3 chaos, and many others. We even see David Baltimore once more, grinning diabolically and holding his ubiquitous sacks of cash.

Although this send-up of Baltimore initially raised a few eyebrows at the California Tech, Caltech’s president doesn’t seem to have a problem with the way he or the campus has been lampooned. “Humor is a special window on truth,” says Baltimore. “I’ll miss the unusual perspective provided by Crippling Depression. I keep looking for the money bags I am portrayed as carrying but I always seem to have mislaid them.”

Before they went their separate ways, the cartoonists spent a few days sitting at a table outside the campus’s Red Door Cafe, hawking their volume, Crippling Depression: The Complete Collection, for $15 apiece. “If we sell at least 200 copies,” said Tim, “we’ll break even.”

For those who missed out on the strips or the collected works, the entire Crippling Depression series, including commentary from the authors, can be read online at www.cripplingdepression.com.