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Engineering humor: The making of an atomic comic
by Rachel Jackson
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“Nukees” is inspired by Darren Bleuel’s experiences as a nuclear engineering student. Both the artist and the strip’s main character Gav can frequently be found at Blakes on Telegraph.
RACHEL JACKSON PHOTO
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One day in 1996, then graduate student Darren Bleuel (B.S.’93, M.S.’97, Ph.D.’03 NE) was hanging out with his nuclear engineering buddies reading the Daily Cal. Someone started complaining about how terrible the comics were; then he turned to Bleuel and said, “You should do a strip.” “About what?” Bleuel asked.
“About us,” came the reply. “About us nukees.”
Bleuel knew the material was just waiting to be mined: comedy born from engineering students slaving away in the industrial environs of Etcheverry Hall, bent double under the demands of professors, pondering the nature of science over beers, and oh, the characters, the gloriously weird characters! Bleuel didn’t hesitate. A comic strip named “Nukees.” Now that would be funny.
He overcame one critical problem—that he didn’t know how to draw—by copying other strips until he felt comfortable creating his own characters. In January 1997, Bleuel published his first strip in the Daily Cal, and the “atomic comic” was born.
“On the outside, it’s about engineers and engineering,” Bleuel says, “but it’s really about people’s feelings and whatever’s in my head.” Some of the situations are culled from his own experience, like living in Etcheverry for a month, harboring crushes on bartenders, and showing up at the wrong time for a midterm.
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Now a health physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Bleuel spends about 10 hours a week writing and drawing the strip, published three times weekly on his website Keenspot, which is devoted to publishing web comics.
Nukees is often set in Etcheverry or Blakes, the famous southside bar, called “Flakes” in the strip. The main character, Gav, is “an exasperated cynic-turned-mad-scientist” loosely based on the strip’s creator. He is joined by a whole cast of characters, vaguely derived from Bleuel's NE student friends, and a “giant, nuclear-powered robot ant.”
With an eight-year run, the comic strip has hit its stride, and Bleuel is happy to keep creating it. “It’s therapeutic,” he says. “It’s nice to get all your feelings down.”
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