The Origin of the Feces

If you have just wandered in here, you may be wondering what the fuck this strip is about. Well, it's about nothing, really, but hopefully this will answer some of your questions anyway.

Martin the Satanic Racoon is simply a comic strip dedicated to everything I find funny. Of course, some people don't think that blood, guts, serial killers, poop, religious cults, necrophilia, and cute furry animals doing horrible things to people are the least bit funny, but obviously this strip is not for them, now is it?

So, where did Martin come from? Well, as some of you might have guessed, I am a big metalhead, and while in college I used to draw racoons and mice and other beasts in my notebooks. Racoons being a favorite, I started drawing them banging their heads, drooling, "rocking out," etc., while making what the lead singer of Cannibal Corpse refers to simply as "the metal sign." (Y'know, the goat-horn hand gesture thingy.) People who spied these drawings asked, "hey, is that a Satanic racoon?" I immediately recognized that a "Satanic Racoon" was a great title, so we named him after my favorite George Romero flick, and Martin was born.

He still didn't have a strip, though. He stayed in my notebooks until nearly two years later when, as the senior illustrator for my college rag, I got sick of rejecting horribly written and abysmally drawn comic strip submissions, and started drawing my own out of sheer desperation. Four years and a few ashcans later, viola! Here I am, firmly entrenched in minicomic hell.

One of the questions I get asked a lot after people read my strip is, "what the fuck is wrong with you?" Nothing, obviously. I draw as well as any human being with six fingers and a vestigial tail. But that's not what they're really asking about; they want to know why the content of the strip is, well, what it usually is. Well, it's probably important to realize that I created Martin while attending the University of California at Santa Cruz, a bastion of rich white liberals if there ever was one. Martin was, in large part, born of my frustration with the P.C.-police, the hippies, and the suffocatingly dogmatic and simple-minded atmosphere that permeated Santa Cruz. I mean, I think I'm pretty liberal, and these people made me want to puke. As it was, the strip didn't even last two years before the editors of the paper kicked me off for being too offensive. So, Martin was a deliberate attempt to get people's goat and catch them being less open-minded than they claimed to be. On that front, it was wildly successful.

Another question I get a lot is, "is Martin really Satanic?" Eh... Yes and no. On one hand, I did simply choose the name "Martin the Satanic Racoon" because it's a great title. On the other hand, I am a big admirer of Anton La Vey and Church of Satan, whom I consider to be very funny, although some of their followers leave something to be desired. I do consider Martin to be a Satanic figure in the LaVeyan sense of uninhibited impulse and for embodying what I like to call "id humor," by making people laugh at things they're not really supposed to laugh at, much the way R. Crumb's Mr. Snoid or S. Clay Wilson's Checkered Demon do. I mean, theoretically you're not supposed to laugh at exploding baby heads and sex acts involving poop, but they can be funny, whether people want to admit it or not.

However, even after reading all of this, some of you are still going to e-mail me and ask, "what the fuck is wrong with you?" My answer to you is, 11 years of Catholic school. Yes, you read that correctly.

And, oh yeah, a "raccoon" and a "racoon" are different but equally correct spellings for the same thing, at least according to my American Heritage Dictionary.

-Gabe Martinez