Senior government and politics major

I met most of my friends at this university by joining a game of Frisbee. That’s random but fairly common. The random encounter that really caught me flat-footed was when we all went to Small Press Expo together.

SPX holds a convention promoting independent comic book artists and publishers — including hard copy and the more prevalent web comic format. My new friends kindly invited me to come along, and because I had never heard of it and because I am arrogant and rude, I assumed it was some tiny event. After all, I had wondered in a moment of absolute ignorance and overall lack of taste how big could it be if Penny Arcade wasn’t going to be there? (I am deeply sorry for even thinking those words in that order.)

SPX takes place in North Bethesda — a city I could not have pointed to on a map at the time — and required a bus trip through areas that might as well have been Mars to me. My friends guided the naive, ignorant me through the doors, and that’s where I had my random encounter.

At some point in my junior year of high school, I found a Web comic called Horribleville. It spoke to me. The artist, KC Green, used his semi-autobiographical comics to talk about his life in a way that was brutally honest but also funny. His outlook was a little depressing, but I was a brooding high schooler and I could relate to every comic about procrastination and feeling uncreative. His sense of humor was vulgar at times, but it was like having an older brother speak to me frankly about life. I think you get by now that I’m a little self-deprecating. He was that way, too.

So naturally, I read his entire archive, spanning four years of intermittent updates, in one sitting. I didn’t know he had moved over to a new series, Gunshow. I assumed he was dead.

So when I saw him standing at his booth, in the flesh, peddling three years’ worth of comics, I did the natural thing: I swore in his face in shock, then hid from him for the rest of the show.

Emma Atlas is a junior government and politics major. She can be reached at eatlasdbk@gmail.com.

[ READ MORE: Strange encounters in college ]