Nate Creekmore created the comic strip “Maintaining” which ran in newspapers from 2007 until 2009. He is currently developing a graphic novel and works as a freelance illustrator. Creekmore lives in Atlanta and occasionally blogs about the city on his website, www.creekification.com. Thank you Nate for sharing your work with the Museum of UnCut Funk. Nate’s story as follows:
I attended a small, cloistered Christian university located in the backyard of one of Nashville Tennessee’s more affluent neighborhoods. As an undergrad, the majority of my time was spent puzzling through the unique customs and peculiarities of the institution, navigating (rather blindly) the general morass, and contributing a comic strip called Maintaining to the sporadically released (and haphazardly constructed) student newspaper. Maintaining won the Scripps Howard Award For Excellence in College Cartooning twice (in 2003 and 2004) and later (in 2005) won the National Collegiate Press award for Best College Comic. After signing a contract with Universal Press Syndicate and spending a year in development, Maintaining became a nationally (and internationally) syndicated newspaper comic strip. It ran in newspapers from May 7, 2007 until August 30, 2009.
Essentially, Maintaining is a comic strip that uses race relations as a reference point from which to comment on life’s all-pervasive absurdity. The two most important characters in the strip are Marcus, the inquisitive self-styled Halfrican American, and Anton, his best friend and cynical counterpoint. Currently, I’m working to publish a book collecting all 823 strips (as well as a few rejected strips, sketches, and other related unpublished tangents).
Wish me luck…
