FOR THE PAST four summers I've worked at the Kiddie Country Day Care Center in Burke, Virginia. We've drawn treehouses, gone on treasure hunts, played Game Boy Advance video games, created amusement park brochures and played some of the most epic hide-and-go-seek games ever. If you read the comic strip that I drew for the past four years, Second Nature, you might recognize a lot of these real-life adventures as cartoon storylines.
Actually, most Second Nature events were somehow inspired by my so-called "job." The character Popsy is named after a first grader named Papsi and started out as a construction paper monkey decoration I made for our classroom. Stories I told about a kung-fu cat called "Meow Meow Ka-Pow" during breaks at the swimming pool became the character of Stray. Every day at Kiddie Country provided a thousand comic ideas.
Playing with my younger sister Sarah helped too. One day we were going through a box of old toys in her room who had been replaced by the Barbie minivan. From the bottom of the box, I pulled out a small Happy Meal mouse and a rubber lizard from the National Zoo. These guys eventually became the characters Squeak-Squeak and Mr. Lizard, who Sarah and I still play with when I come home for breaks.
A few years ago at Kiddie Country, Michael Marteeny brought in a collection of Calvin and Hobbes comics (Second Nature's biggest influence). When I saw him and his friends laughing at the same things that I would laugh at, it became a goal for my comic. If I could make both kids and adults smile at the beginning of their day, that's when I felt successful. The best compliment I ever received was a call from my second-grade teacher about how she and her children read Second Nature online.
Creating the world of Ashley, Billy and Cameron (A-B-C) was an excuse for me to be a kid again. Looking back at some of the older strips, it's amazing how much the characters and drawings have changed, but since day one I knew how the story would end. I wanted to reveal that both Ashley and Cameron had the same seasonal friends and I wanted to use proper capitalization for the first time (a subtle sign of their growing up). In the meantime, I tried to take the "naive kid/talking animal" comic beyond its cliches and into fresh, different and imaginative stories. There are 446 Second Nature comics, all permanently archived at dave2n.com if you want to take a look back in a few years.
Second Nature the comic is over. If it made you remember what it was like to be a kid at least once and maybe laugh a few times, that's all I really wanted. If Second Nature were ever to continue one day, I'd tell the parallel story from Ashley's point of view. But I also want to do so many different things: Write and illustrate children's books, become a teacher, build a treehouse, become a rockstar... these are my dreams. Drawing a comic strip was one of them. I can't wait to see what's next.
(Dave Werner was 1999-2002 graphics editor and 1998-2002 cartoonist.)
::Complete Second Nature Fact Sheet::
The following list is completely, entirely, absolutely useless. Never will any of the following facts impress anyone at a cocktail party. Most of this information is scattered around the rest of the site, but here it is as a single list.
-Cameron is named after a character in a series of detective stories Dave wrote in elementary school called "Mac and Cam," as well as being the name of Jimmy Buffett's son.
-Originally, Second Nature was going to be called "Light Seasoning" and be the story of two brothers. Seasonal characters that didn't make the final cut were a frog named Bayou and two fish named Bank and Angel.
-The name "Second Nature" comes from the name of Dave's band before they changed it to Okay Samurai.
-Portman is based on Portman Wills, Dave's friend from UVA who is the biggest computer nerd ever. He also happened to his fourth-year class president.
-Maui was going to be called Croix, Maarten or Nassau, after some of the Virgin Islands, but Maui seemed like a better name for a dog.
-Ashley was based on Dave's high school (and still current) crush.
-If you look closely at the "Meddlesome Octopus" roller coaster in the Bagdaddy series, you'll notice the track is impossible to ride on.
-Although the treehouse plays a prominent role in the comic, Dave never had one growing up...he plans to build the coolest one ever one day. The picture on the home page of the website comes from The Treehouse Book by Peter and Judy Nelson.
-Starting in Winter 2001 there is a star hidden in just about every single comic (Dave forgot a few times).
-Billy Witherspoon wasn't really based on anyone; Witherspoon is just a funny sounding name.
-Popsy is named after Popsy, one of the children from the Kiddie Country day care center where Dave worked. He was first drawn as a classroom decoration; the original construction paper Popsy is on a collage in Dave's room.
-While at UVA, Dave also designed the "Spikey Hair Guy" Dance Marathon logo and the "Hoo-02" fourth-year class logo...but not the infamous Reinemund "Rhino"...that was fellow comic artist Matt Oliver.
-Stray evolved out of a character Dave made up called "Meow Meow Kapow". One of the comics reveals that the number on his shirt corresponds to how many of his nine lives he's lost...it's usually 3, but in the ending sequence it's 2. Guess he lost a life during kung-fu training with Kabahushi...
-Rodney Kiyama is based on a character who appears for 15 seconds in an old promotional video for Nintendo; it's a guy named Rodney Kiyama who loves the Super Nintendo video game Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball.
-The three main characters of Ashley, Billy and Cameron are taken from the letters A-B-C.
-The Second Nature World video game was originally going to have two extra levels: Cameron's house (with a secret underground tunnel in the basement) and Bagdaddy's Six Bags Amusement Park (where you would have rode the "Meddlesome Octopus" roller coaster).
-Just like "Advancing Comic Technology" says, if you stick a CD in a microwave for 3 seconds, you'll ruin the CD but see awesome blue sparks.
-The panda character Healey is named after Sean Healey, Dave's friend from UVA who worked with him in Dance Marathon and the Cavalier Daily.
-Halfway through the comic, Cameron loses his hat and gets a new one. From then on, the hat was drawn differently.
-Reno is based on Adam Reno, Dave's friend from UVA who worked with him on the Dance Marathon fundraising event for three years.
-Cookieface Galaraga, The Grammar Schol-ah, is based on Dave's relentless-grammar-correcting Dad.
-In the comic where Cameron is building a sand castle, the outline of Kabahushi the Ninja Grasshopper is in the background, foreshadowing his comeback.
-Dave drew a 3-page comic called "How To Draw A Comic Strip" for the UVA publication Misspent Youth.
-There were 446 Second Nature comics that ran in the Cavalier Daily from January 20, 1999 to April 26, 2002.
-The only time Cameron and Ashley ever speak with proper capitalization is in the final strip; a sign of their growing up.
-About halfway through the comic, Dave started drawing in a bigger size, which is why the newer strips seem more detailed than the older ones. The first "big" strip was the John Woo one.
-Kabahushi the Ninja Grasshopper is taken from Dave's band's first song, "Grasshopper Suicide".
-The "S" on Bluster's hat stands for...snow.
-The UVA Jazz Ensemble played "Second Nature Improv" at their April 2002 concert, reading through 3 winter comic strips and assigning character voices to different instruments.
-Squeak-Squeak and Mr. Lizard are based on a McDonalds Happy Meal stuffed animal mouse and rubber lizard from the National Zoo that Dave's younger sister Sarah plays with.
-The original ending introduced a flying fish called "Swimmy Fishtastic" who was going to explain everything to Cameron and Ashley, a role later filled just by Squeak-Squeak.
