A Brief History of Mr. Fitz

From 2000 to the present

I drew my first educational comic strip in Kindergarten. We were to draw a picture for Fire Safety Week of what students should do if the school was on fire.

I drew a picture very much like the above reproduction: kids roasting marshmallows over the smouldering embers of the school.

I started teaching in Florida in 1990, got laid off for two years, and started again in 1996. Teaching can be… stressful. I started drawing comics about my experiences. In 1999 I sent my comics to the Daytona Beach News-Journal to see if they would run them. They had no space, I was told. In March of 2000, space opened up and I was off!

I ran Mr. Fitz 5 times a week and later 6 times a week from 2000 to 2018. I had fun picking on the fiobles of students, but especially on the absurdity of standardization and education reform.

I began to get a little tired of that much writing (it’s the hardest writing I know!) so I switched to a smaller paper, the DeLand Beacon, which only ran 3 strips a week, stacked on the same page. I was able to record in comics form the experience of teaching through a pandemic.

I began to draw Sunday-style strips for the Beacon since I had a nice square space to work with. In 2022, I decided it was time to end the strip, so I did, 22 years to the day since I started it.

This lasted two months.

I restarted the strip, Sunday’s only later that spring, and have been drawing it faithfully since then.

Who knows? If I get enough Substack subscribers, I might be persuaded to start drawing some “daily” strips again!