| Cool Alum: The story of an atomic comic
NE alum draws the funny world of engineering
by Rachel Jackson
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ENGINEERING HUMOR : NE alum Darren Bleuel spends nine to 10 hours a week writing and drawing the Nukees comic strip.
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One day in 1996, then NE Ph.D. student Darren Bleuel (B.S. '93 Ph.D. '03 NE) was hanging out with his NE friends, reading the Daily Cal funnies. "These comics suck," one friend declared. Then he turned to Bleuel and said, "You should do a strip."
"About what?" asked Bleuel.
"About us," came the reply. "About us Nukees."
Ah, 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, navigating a minefield of personal relationships, and oh the characters, the gloriously weird characters! Bleuel didn't hesitate. A comic strip named "Nukees" -- now that would be funny. Only one problem: He couldn't draw.
Any engineer knows a problem only exists to be worked down to its solution. Bleuel didn't know how to draw, but he could copy with the best of them, so copy he did: Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, anything he could get his hands on.
"I got good enough so I could eventually teach myself to draw," he says. In January 1997, Bleuel published his first Nukees strip in the Daily Cal, and the "atomic comic" was born.
"On the outside, it's about engineers and engineering," explains Bleuel. "But it's really about people's feelings and whatever's in my head."
Nukees often takes place in Etcheverry Hall or the southside bar Blakes (Flakes in the strip), where Bleuel sometimes creates the cartoon. It features a whole cast of NE student characters, vaguely derived from Bleuel's NE friends. The characters include, says Bleuel, the main character, Gav, who is "an exasperated cynic-turned-mad-scientist" (and loosely based on its creator), and a "giant, nuclear-powered, robot ant."
Some of the comic situations are culled from Bleuel's own experiences, such as living in Etcheverry for a month, harboring crushes on bartenders, and showing up at the wrong time for a midterm.
After he graduated, Bleuel got a job at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and is now a health physicist there. He's also the co-owner of Keenspot, a Web site devoted to publishing web comics, including Nukees.
With an eight-year run, the comic strip has hit its stride, and Bleuel says he's happy to keep creating it. "It's therapeutic," he says. "It's nice to get all your feelings down."
Read the strip and learn more at http://www.nukees.com/ .
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