It’s been a weird road from neuro-psychology, to cartooning, to juvenile justice for Your Square Life creator Lee Post. 

 When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful. –  Barbara Bloom, sculptor

 In high school I was named homecoming king, which I later discovered was voted on by the teachers, rather than the students, much to the student’s active and obvious disapproval (all of which I was oblivious of). Basically, I got up during a sparsely attended football game - our team at the time was the lowest ranked in the nation - to meek applause and rode around the track in a jeep, giving the queen’s wave to the audience. I walked up a long stretch of red visqueen to the awaiting cheerleaders, who gave me a large Styrofoam heart on a cardboard tube and a puff-painted sash. They then positioned a child’s soft plastic crown onto my head. The crown had pipe cleaner numbers hot-glued on the front that looked a bit wilted. The lead cheerleader leaned in and whispered, “The real crown didn’t come in.”  All I remember following that was blankly wandering around the high school dance later that evening, dateless, holding my Styrofoam and cardboard scepter, wearing my proxy crown as I surveyed my subjects, then leaving after 20 minutes to watch TV at home alone.  Lee Post, creator of Your Square Life

 

 A few weeks before Valentine’s Day 2008, Bloom’s quote and Post’s homecoming story collide on the streets of Kyoto, Japan. Post is traveling with his wife Alexandra, so you don’t have to feel guilty for laughing at his pitiful reign as king; things turned out all right for Post eventually.  
   

It was near the statue of Astroboy, the Japanese cartoon character, that Post and his wife were approached by a small band of young Japanese students wearing matching yellow baseball caps and red backpacks.
    

At his blog Post states, “In broken English, they peppered us with questions. They asked us our names, what sports teams we liked, how we liked Kyoto. Then their hands shot out with folded paper cranes as a gift.”
The kids even had the Posts sign their signature books.  Sure, the story starts out innocently enough but it ends with hordes of curious schoolchildren enthusiastically chasing Post and his wife back to an escape by taxi.
    

If there is a point to turning Bloom’s and Post’s quotes into a medley it’s that during his homecoming kingship you can almost hear young Post’s heart breaking, but a lucky audience has profited from Post’s aggrandizement of his once forlorn experiences with love and popularity in his comic strip Your Square Life.  
It’s nice to think that maybe the mob of Japanese children acutely perceived imperfections in Post’s history that translated into points of interest and beauty. If nothing else, this thought should make you feel less guilty for having laughed at his earlier misfortune in high school.

Post said that YSL evolved from a zine of the same name that he’d produced for three years after graduating with a focus on cognitive neuro-psychology from the University of Washington.  Post even got a big research award while at the University.

“There were three of us on a panel meeting Nobel Laureates and they’re asking us what we want to do,” Post said. There was the doctor who said he was going to do some research into cancer. There was the geologist who said he was going to become a professor and study rocks.

“Then there was me, and I’m like I’m going to go back to Alaska and I don’t know what I’m doing. Silence in the auditorium.”

And that’s what happened. Upon graduation, Post returned to his native Alaska, moved into a basement apartment, and was working overnight hours as a Mental Health Technician in the juvenile unit of a hospital, with little chance to date.

 

“So it became, finding a girlfriend became a big focus and was one of the reasons that I started the zine,” he said.
One of Post’s friends introduced him to Robert Meyerowitz, who at the time was the editor of the alternative newspaper, the Anchorage Press . Meyerowitz had seen some of Posts’ early comic strips in the zine and offered him a weekly strip in the Press.

“What better way to have a weekly advertisement that I needed a girlfriend than to have a comic strip?” Post reasoned.

It worked. Within six months of starting the strip he met and became engaged to his wife, Alexandra, a native of Belfast, Ireland who happened to be in Anchorage with an internship. The couple was engaged only five weeks after meeting.  Post said she left two months later, then came back to complete INS paperwork and then embarked on a trip around the world. Post said he’d periodically get a call from Australia or elsewhere in the world and the conversation would go something like this:

Alexandra: I’m in the rainforest in an outdoor shower. Did you get the flowers ordered?
Post: Yes, I got them
Alexandra: I’m in New Zealand on a Harley with a guy named Bear. How are those invites coming?
Post: They’re doing good honey.

A week before the wedding Alexandra returned to Alaska and the two have been together for five years. 
The 145-page collection that comprises Lee Post’s “The Very Best of Your Square Life,” is hard to describe but is probably best summed up by the following description of one of his comics:

A menacing monkey cosmonaut riding an asteroid falls to earth and crushes a clown. Both clown and monkey share the same thought bubble: “My life has been a long strange journey. Ah well…C’est la vie.”

Your Square Life is a strange journey, one that’s populated by lovable losers, unrequited love, blind ambition, offbeat humor, and of course, robots, lots of robots.
It’s evident when talking to Post where the odd humor in YSL comes from. His anecdotes follow the same template as his comics. No matter how weird you may think the premise, in the last panel, last line, last sentence there is a punch line, or a payoff waiting, or sometimes just a sad, awkward beat but always a glimmer of humanity.
 Post has compared the structure of his comics to that of writing haiku. One of his comics offers Post’s observation, “Rather than being funny or insightful, I worry the strip tends to lapse into bad short poetry.” The accompanying illustration of a man with an octopus on his head picking blooms from a low-hanging branch digresses and the comic takes a slightly more ridiculous twist reminiscent of a commercial for Obsession cologne: “Despair…raindrops…sadness…octopus. (*insert fart joke here).”

Describing his early comics Post said, “[They are] a mix between my pathetic cry for a girlfriend and basically me exploring my friends’ relationship problems through the strip.”

Many of these people feared for the future of YSL when they heard that Post was going to get married.
“I remember getting a lot of letters from friends at the time who were like, ‘Nooo! Your strip is going to turn into Ziggy.’ It was a big thing at the time with people saying, ‘What are you going to do if you’re actually happy and in a stable relationship?’” Post said.

 

It was a concern that Post shared, but six years and 300 comics later it’s evident that more material was available. In the 145 comics offered in his collection, there is rarely one that doesn’t offer at least a smile and many in the bunch that force upon you unexpected laughter.

Post has worked as a juvenile probation officer for a number of years and often wrote the strips during lunches and illustrated them on weekends. He said it was hard to keep incidents from work out of the comic.

As an example Post said, “I got a call the other day from an officer, who is a little bit odd, about a kid who was like going around knocking people in the nuts.”

Officer: You can’t let this go. This kid’s been hitting all these guys in the groin. And we need to arrest him.
Post: You know, that doesn’t sound like an arrest-able offense.
Officer: No, the kids are calling it sack-tapping.
Post: So there’s a string of sack-tapping incidents?
Officer: Yes! Yes, we have to do something about it!
Post: (mumbles) Oh god, why are we here?

There aren’t always moments of levity in Posts job in juvenile justice, working with kids and teens in crisis. Early on, Post said he worked in child protection, which he refers to as “baby stealing” and as a juvenile probation officer he routinely fights in court “over what amounts to nothing” On the other end of the spectrum he also deals with cases that involve sexual abuse or violence. He said both his day job and art are rewarding and frustrating and part of the reason that he gave up the comic strip was so that he could focus on his job and family.

An audience outside of Alaska is lucky that Post decided to end the strip after his 300th comic. If not for this, he may never have taken the time to collect the strips into a book.  

Post described the anxiety that working a full-time job and having a weekly deadline began to impose.
“If I wasn’t drawing the strip, I was thinking about doing next week’s strip or trying to work drawing the strip around a camping trip or something,” he said. “Towards the end you really got the idea how some of those strips like ‘Beatle Bailey’ or ‘Garfield’ die on the vine.”

If nothing else, YSL really was one of Post’s selling points with Alexandra. “It turned out she had read the comic strip and that was one thing that I was able to impress her with, other than my handsome smile…I’m looking at her right now,” Post said, pausing a beat. “Yeah. Yeah, she just flipped me off.”
Did you hear that crack? Is it a chink in Post’s romantic bliss?  We can only hope that more comedic gold is on the way.  

visit Lee Post’s blog at YourSquareLife.blogspot.com