Real Life with Karl Tate

Real Life by Karl Tate

Real Life by Karl Tate is an interesting comic strip that ran in a Louisiana State University student newspaper, the Daily Reville, way back in 1980-1982. It's a fairly amusing minor comic that was published in a book of cartoons around this time by the author. I found this book some years later, I think it would have been 1987, in a 99 cent bin at the San Diego Comicon.

The comics were great, with some real gems -- my favorite being the interview with Captain Kirk from Star Trek II. It's a slice of life from the early 80's, when games like Pac Man, Asteroids and Defender occupied the minds of young people like the web does today, the Macintosh did not exist yet, when Star Wars was still king of SF movies, when the Challenger had not blown up. They were read by all the Seishun Shitemasu Productions members, and some elements -- God's Teeth! -- even found their way into our parody anime productions. Certainly, I got my 99 cents worth.

This book is (C) 1980, 1981, 1982 Karl Tate, and Keith R. Holmes Publisher. The address given for the publisher is PO Box 801112, Dallas, TX 75380. The cartoons are reproduced here utterly without permission of any kind, mainly because I cannot find any location for either the artist or the publisher.

UPDATE circa 2003: Karl Tate has found us! He's a cool guy, working as an illustrator, and he's a Mac user and anime fan. Happily, he gave his permission to post these comics here.

A note about the scanning. I scanned these pages as-is, and all poor duplication is a result of the original source being light and/or poorly printed. Sorry if some of the funny jokes are hard to read. It was only a buck ^_^

So, without further delay, I present Real Life, by Karl Tate.