SO SOCAL: The Best...The Beautiful...And The Bizarre : . . . And My Minor’s in Looney Tunes

Little Orphan Annie never finished grammar school; Beetle Bailey dropped out of college to join the Army, but many contemporary comic strips boast university pedigrees. “Bull Tales,” which Garry Trudeau drew at Yale University, became “Doonesbury”; Berke Breathed reworked his University of Texas strip, “The Academia Waltz,” into “Bloom County”; Jeff Shesol moved “Thatch” from Brown University to Creators Syndicate.

That fact isn’t lost on cartoon book publisher Andrews McMeel Universal and Follett College Stores, who organized a contest, judged by six editors at the Universal Press Syndicate, that produced “Strip Search: Revealing Today’s Best College Cartoonists” (Andrews McMeel: $9.95, paperback).

Although Stephen Emond of Middlesex Community Technical College, Madison, Conn., took home the $2,000 Grand Prize, “Strip Search” features the work of five Southern California students: Jacob Lightbody (Orange Coast College, first place, single panel), Ray Lancon (USC, second place, single panel), C. Haun (Cypress College, honorable mention, other cartoons), Dan Lee (USC, runner-up) and Victor Hernandez (San Diego State University, runner-up). Lancon, who drew the cartoon at left especially for So SoCal to commemorate the end of summer, notes that one of the biggest temptations young artists face is the urge to imitate the strips they grew up loving. “When I started out, I did a ‘Far Side’ clone,” he says. “Finding my own look took a long time and a lot of cartoons. It pays to go out on a limb and do what you think is funny.”

Haun and Emond are continuing to submit samples of their work to the syndicates. Lancon graduated in May and has decided to make cartooning a hobby while he pursues a more lucrative career: television writer.