Apartment Complex started off innocently enough in the fall/winter of 2000. I was a sophomore at Ohio University-Zanesville, and every once in a while, the school would be lucky enough to get copies of the main campus' student newspaper The Post. Hidden in the back pages were two comics, a one-panel called "MadGame" and a strip called "Nutz." While I never thought much of the quality of these strips, I admired the kids that created them, because, hey, they were in a newspaper and I was not.

So I decided to start a strip, and then when I relocated to the main campus, I'd submit it to the paper and hopefully they'd like it enough to run it. So began the short-lived but very popular (at least among my friends) "Campus Chat."

"Campus Chat" centered around the characters who would soon move into "Apartment Complex," but in "Campus Chat," they were all college students who worked in the campus radio station. This was based on real-life, where myself and my closest friends at school all were involved in the college radio station (I recommend this to any college student - it's a blast). "Campus Chat" took on a life of its own, and I ended up with about 8 weeks' worth of strips - including Sundays. There were some real gems in there, and they may work their way into "Apartment Complex" someday, but because they're mostly related to college life, I really have no use for the gags ("Apartment Complex" centers around twenty-somethings, but they're not in college). When my friends and I got ready to make the move to Ohio University in Athens, so did the kids in "Campus Chat." They packed up their bags and said goodbye to the radio station, and started life at Ohio College.

It was then that I started working at The Post and then submitted my strips to see if they'd like to start running them. But, I was later told, there had been problems with the cartoonists from the past year, and they would not run comics that year.

I was crushed. I had worked for six months on my strips and now I was being told that I'd pretty much wasted my time. It was then that I changed the approach and the title. "Apartment Complex" was born.

(And just in case you're wondering, the title comes from the very first strip. Upon being asked if she liked her new apartment, Melissa rattles off a list of everything that's wrong with it. When she leaves, BJ comments that she has a complex, to which Kiesha adds, "Yeah. An apartment complex." Insert rim shot here.)

"Apartment Complex" trudged on in my own mind and notebook for a while. After two horrible quarters at the newspaper, I quit. I got my old summer job back at my hometown newspaper, and I made the hour and a half long trip every weekend so I could be a page designer making 'mad cash.' I missed writing, and most of all, I really wanted an outlet for the strip.

Then I found a wonderful little website called OhioRocks. It was a site by, for and about Ohio University students, and as I noticed, they did not have a comic strip. So, I sent an e-mail out, advertising myself as an entertainment writer and cartoonist. I was asked to be both.

So, "Apartment Complex" went online. And it turned out to be a big hit among the people who frequented the site. The strip enjoyed a two-quarter run, in the Spring and Fall of 2002.

In May 2002, I got an interesting surprise. The editor at my hometown newspaper had seen the comics online, and of course the many notebooks I dragged into work to sneak peeks at and make notes on my jokes during breaks. She approached me one afternoon and said simply, "Your comic. I want to put it in the paper."

Simple as that. "Apartment Complex" made it's grand debut in the Zanesville Times Recorder in May 2002 and it's still running there now. In fact, in two weeks it will celebrate its one-year anniversary. But what came along with publication in the Times Recorder was even better. Because the strip appears on the 'teen page,' and because the 'teen page' is sent out onto the wire that several other Central Ohio newspapers can access, "Apartment Complex" was soon being run in 3 other newspapers - the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, the Chillicothe Gazette, and the Coshocton Tribune. And the great thing is, people actually read it. While no one's sent a Letter to the Editor to the paper about it, I've heard from a few people that they always read it.

In March, I got the idea to form this website. Hopefully once I graduate in June, I'm going to take it much bigger and better, but for now, this is just fine.

Enjoy the show.

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