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Apparently Scott Dikkers (who wrote and drew "Jim's Journal") was indeed one of many co-creators of The Onion, as evinced by this article/interview I just dug up from CityPages, a Twin Cities online webmagazine, with the many people involved with The Onion:
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Well, we're getting into some paleolithic shit by Onion standards. Only Dikkers, "Old Man" Dikkers they call him, goes back that far [to the beginning]. "Old," in this case, means 31 years. (Try to say 32, though, and he'll set the record straight, fast.) Old Man Dikkers was there in the old days--1988--when a creative business major first thought to compile a cartoon strip from the college daily into an 11-by-17-inch calendar with bratwurst ads on the back. Not a familiar tectonic profile for today's hypequake of 4.1 million readers...
But that summer, this business major, Tim Keck was his name, teamed up with a like-minded entrepreneurial soul, Chris Johnson, and Keck's mother contributed this moniker--the Onion--which is news lingo for a juicy, multi-layered story. (And, as Dikkers points out, naming something after a food is always a positive idea.)
Not that the first few issues were worth more than their pulp weight. "I was pretty stunned at how terrible it was," Dikkers says. He'd contributed a few cartoons, but had hedged his bet by leaving his own comic strip, "Jim's Journal," at the Daily Cardinal, where he received all of, say, $5 a strip. "The second issue was actually a big hit, though," Dikkers says. "It was better than the first, but it was still pretty crappy. It had some pull-out, Crazed Drunk Backstabbing Sorority Girls Drinking Game... I still thought the writing was abysmal."
So for the third issue, Dikkers showed up with a few notions at Onion headquarters--better known then as Chris Johnson's dorm room--and a few weeks later he was... the de facto editor! Putting out a paper with one writer, one computer and no printer... running to Kinko's in the hours normal folks like to call ungodly. Pasting corrections right onto paper. In one evocative, Borges-ian scene, Dikkers found himself in the aforementioned godless, wintry hours, chasing a cut-out of the letter "e" down the center of Regent Street.
And when Keck and Johnson wanted out of the paper business a year later, there was Dikkers with one grand--which was a pretty nerve-wracking investment for back then, Dikkers says--and this ad rep named Pete Haise with his grand, and a computer guy who was gone within the year.
Today, Scott Dikkers is 31 years old, divorced, and dating a lesbian--a relationship that seems to be working out better than one might guess. Dikkers is a can-do guy that way, the furthest thing from the lollygagging thirty-nothing of media lore. Really he represents--what's the phrase--a Renaissance Man... if one is ready to recognize the artistry of cartooning and producing sketch comedy for television and radio.
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Still trying to find scans or samples of "Jim's Journal" online somewhere -- anyone else even heard of this strip? |
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