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Aggielife
The Battalion
Page 3A * Tuesday, February 17, 2004
►
By Kim Katopodis
THE BATTALION
Ruben DeLuna strolled up to the checkout at
Blockbuster and handed the clerk his card. The
clerk, recognizing his name said, “Are you the
guy who does (the comic) ‘Fish?’" DeLuna
replied, “Yeah, that’s me, and I think 1 have
some fines.” With a gleam in his eye, the clerk
countered, “Not anymore.”
Known to his fans as simply R. DeLuna,
Ruben DeLuna, a graduate student in visualiza
tion sciences, is the comic mastermind behind
one of The Battalion’s longest-running comics,
‘Fish.’’ Deluna has been drawing “Fish” for 11
semesters and has recently published a collec
tion of the first 10 semesters of his comic in the
book. “Fish out of Water.”
Before "Fish,” though. DeLuna had
always drawn.
“I’ve been drawing since I can remember. I
mean, I was drawing little comic books since I
was little - you know, superheroes and that
kind of stuff, but I had never really drawn a
comic strip.”
His first comic was in high school.
"There was a contest in high school and
theywould take comic book submissions and
they would print the best submissions, so I got
toand they printed it,” DeLuna said. “1 was
probably the only one that entered so ... it was-
nfxperawesome or anything, and actually,
fccomic they printed in there was called
‘Scoot and Eightball.’ Scoot is a character I
made up, and it’s actually the same character I
carried over into ‘Fish.’ So that’s where he
came from, sort of an homage to the comic that
ran in high school ”
The “Fish” odyssey started DeLuna’s sopho
more year when he started drawing “Fish” for
The Battalion.
“When I first started out, my whole week
would be just one story line. Now 1 kind of
abandoned the story lines and come up with
different topics everyday,” DeLuna said. “A
lot of times, when stuff bothers me or I’m
kind of ticked off about something - police
officers, PITS, whatever - usually I take my
wrath out through my comic. It’s kind of a
misuse of power.”
Students, such as sophomore education major
Jenifer Garrison, say they enjoy DeLuna’s A&M
social commentary.
“He came out with one comic that I just
found to be so pertinent ” Garrison said. “It was
about the Southside Parking Garage and how
people could park there on a first-come, first-
serve basis and those of us who paid for a spot
were just out of luck.”
Garrison said her roommate also reads “Fish”
everyday and that they always talk about it.
“We’re always asking each other ‘did you see
‘Fish’today?”’ she said.
Deluna said his ideas come from a variety of
sources, but a few of his characters are based on
people in his life.
“Middle-aged Larry was actually based on
someone in my freshman year math class,”
Deluna said. “He was just a guy who was real
ly, well, middle-aged, and he just looked like a’
Larry’ to me. He just looked out of place and
bow he looked is actually how the guy in the
comic looks.”
The character Tisdale is named after a friend
of his from high school, and the character Ryan
is named after his brother.
“(Ryan) is the character I use to express my
views, and if something happens to him, some
thing similar to that probably happened to me,”
he said.
Ryan’s girlfriend in “Fish” is based on
DeLuna’s real-life girlfriend Sarah Fowler,
also a visualization sciences graduate student.
The two met in one of their graduate classes.
They dated for more than a semester before
Fowler’s character, Flower, appeared in
DeLuna’s comic.
“He didn’t really ask me if he could do
it, but he had been mentioning adding a
girlfriend character it, so it wasn’t a big sur
prise or anything,” Fowler said. “There was
actually a secret appearance of me the
semester before on Valentine’s Day, but the
character got a different look when she
became a regular.”
Fowler said the one thing she doesn’t like
about her character is that she is too serious.
“ I’m like, ‘Why can’t my character ever be
funny?’ and he’s like, ‘You are the voice of
reason,’ so I get characterized in that way,”
she said.
DeLuna said a lot of people write him by e-
mail or through his Web site.
“1 had a few people that e-mailed me and
said, ‘Hey why don’t you put these all together
of make a book’ or ‘If you ever published a
book, I would be the first in line to buy it,”’
DeLuna said. “So it’s always been in the back of
my head.”
Sometimes fans get a little overzealous in
their mail to DeLuna.
“There was a girl who read the comic pretty
often and would write me and say that pretty
much everything I ever wrote about, she was
just thinking about the day before,” DeLuna
said. “She just thought it was really freaky that I
was almost reading her mind ... She said it jok
ingly but she said, ‘Sometimes I think we’re
soul mates.’”
DeLuna didn’t know how to go about pub
lishing a book, but began to look into it.
“There was actually a place online that was
offering book publishing and they would print
your book if you would just send it to them,”
he said. “I had to lay everything out myself. I
layed it out and made the cover myself. It took
two or three weeks. I worked on it over the
Christmas break.”
DeLuna’s book is now available through his
Web site, www.rdeluna.com, and he is in the
process of talking with bookstores around town
to have them sold locally.
“ I want to see if they would be interested in
carrying it so more people will know that it’s out
there,” DeLuna said.
With a master’s degree in visualization sci
ences, DeLuna will have many options after
graduation this spring, just not any that neces
sarily have to do with comic strips.
“The comic thing is kind of backup occu
pation number four,” DeLuna said. “If it hap
pened, that would be cool, but I’m not bank
ing on it.”
The thing that most interests DeLuna is
something in the arts end of graphic design.
“The program I’m in does computer anima
tion and graphics, so I will be working in the
graphics field,” DeLuna said. “With my experi
ence working at the newspaper and my master’s
degree, I will be doing graphics somehow. If
the opportunity presented itself, I would love to
do movies. I just want something more on the
art end.”
FI5H OUT of water I Fish Out of Water
A Fish collection
by R.DeLuna
at
www.rdeluna.com
A Fish Collection by ft.DeLuno