10 Zen Monkeys talks to Perry Bible Fellowship creator Nicholas Gurewitch about the success of his webcomics collection, The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories. Gurewitch also touches on his possible FBI record:
NG: Or the spirits of the students, or the thinking of students.
I was an editor of an underground newspaper that we distributed in high school. We ruffled a lot of feathers. I think I have an FBI record because of it.
LC: How do you get an FBI record for an underground newspaper? Are you sure?
NG: Someone tells me I do, for certain.
A local pastor had seen the work that we were doing in the paper, and he must’ve thought we were more than the basic renegade kids because he wrote a letter to the FBI. This is right after Columbine, and he thought our paper displayed many warning signs for troubled youth.
He was probably right about that. We certainly were troubled youth. I just don’t think we were the type of troubled youth that would express ourselves with guns.
LC: Well, wait — what was in this newspaper?
NG: We had a section where we presented fictionalized accounts of our teachers fighting each other, and how those fights would go. We’d show a big picture of them, and then a “versus,” and then another teacher. It was really entertaining if you had these people as teachers. Lots of blood, lots of violence. Lets hope they never end up online.
We actually published the pastor’s letter in the following issue. We also did a word search, and we hid the word “clitoris”. It was a point at which we lost a lot of our audience.
On the business end, Gurewitch says the collection of strips from the popular webcomic is about to go into a third printing.
