Superstar

I found the above artwork this weekend while cleaning out the closet in my home office. It is from 1974 and was drawn for a review of Jesus Christ Superstar that I did for my high school newspaper.

I had a love/hate relationship with the school newspaper in this, my senior year. I wanted to be Editor that year, but, in one of the truly embarrassing moments of my life, I was the only person in the journalism class who voted for me. Not even my best friend voted for me. I was made News Editor instead, which meant the front page was mine (or the first and second page when we had an eight-page issue).

I spent hours and hours, when I should have been in other classes, in the journalism room laying out and pasting up that damn paper at the request of the journalism teacher. Then one day while I was in there, she came in with a teacher whose class I was supposed to be in that period and pretended she didn't know what I was doing there, like she hadn't told me to get the paper finished. She said. "You don't belong here." and I said, "You're right; I quit!" and I dropped the class that afternoon. Baron, my best friend who didn't vote for me, took over the News Editor job for the rest of the year.

Looking back on those papers (I found a ton of them in my closet), I can tell which ones I did the layouts for; I had a certain style you see. Too bad I didn't trust white space; these things are super crowded.