The making of Scootah Steve
Steve and Jimmy are just a few of the characters brought into students’ homes each week. They are part of the Scootah Steve comic strip, written by USU student Steve Weller.
Weller said he has always had a passion for drawing.
“I’ve been drawing all my life on whatever I could get my hands upon,” said Weller, senior in English education. “In junior high I wanted to be a comic book artist. I grew up on comic books like Batman and Spiderman and always wanted to do something similar to those.”
However, Weller’s aspirations to be a comic book artist were demolished when comic books decided to take a on a different type of personality.
“During the end of my junior high years, comic books started to become a little risqué,” Weller said. “I’ve always liked regular comic strips and they have always been good clean fun. I decided then that the direction of a comic strip instead of a comic book is more of where I wanted to go.”
Weller’s dream of publishing a comic strip happened during his freshman year of college, while attending Snow College in Ephraim. He got some of his inspiration from Adam Sandler, friends and family members.
“When I was in high school, the movie Big Daddy came out,” he said. “My friends started calling me ‘Scuba Steve’ from off of the movie. A few years later I went and served an LDS mission and when I came home from my mission I bought me a scooter. After I bought my scooter, my dad started to call me “Scootah Steve,” and that’s where my idea for the comic strip came from.”
After Weller attended Snow College he moved to USU and hoped his comic strip could be printed here.
“I had published Scootah Steve for two years and wanted to continue with it,” he said. “I went and talked to Jay Wamsley, the adviser over the Statesman and asked if I could put the comic strip into the paper, and he let me.”
Scootah Steve is not only published in each issue of the Statesman but also in every Friday’s issue of the Herald Journal and in the campus paper published at Snow College. With the pressure of putting out a comic strip that is published in three separate newspapers, the difficulty of coming up with new ideas may seem like a struggle. But Weller said he finds it more as an adventure.
“You can find inspiration in anything,” he said. “I find a lot of my material in boring class lectures. The teacher will be talking and say a word and I will just go with it. Just recently, one of my teachers was talking about some event he went to that didn’t turn out quite as planned. While my professor was talking about this specific event he used the word debacle. Immediately after he used the word, I knew I could use that in my comic strip. I brainstormed and created a strip of the character Jimmy trying to define the word debacle in a sentence. It seemed to work out very well.”
Weller says he always keeps a pad of paper and a pen with him because ideas hit him at the most random times.
“I need to always have something to write down my ideas with,” he said. “If not, I could lose some really good story ideas.”
To create a comic strip, Weller said it takes planning and concentration.
“Once I have a really good idea, I sit down and play around with it,” he said. “I write the dialogue down first, map out the comic strip, sketch it, and then ink the drawings in. By the time everything is said and done, it takes me between 45 minutes to an hour of work.”
To make sure Weller has enough time to finish a comic, he said a lot of them are drawn months ahead of deadline.
“I get the majority of all my comics done in the summertime,” he said. “That way I don’t have to worry about deadlines or trying to think of an idea last minute. By doing it this way, I have never been pressed up against a wall trying to decide what to draw and hurrying to get it done.”
Weller says that he hopes to one day become a recognized comic strip artist.
“I want to be like Bill Watterson, author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes,” he said. “I just want to be a name that is recognized in households. I want to be doing this for a very long time.”
-courtnie.packer@aggiemail.usu.edu