Who Draws This Thing?

Doctor Diatribe is drawn by an IT guy named Jim Carter who lives with his wife, two kids, and a cat within the sphere of influence of Houston, Texas.


Armed with his trusty Liberal Arts degree, Jim has taught himself such utterly unrelated jobs as mortgage banking, accounting, debt counseling, and lately SQL coding. Regrettably, a tragic character flaw condemns him to doing this kind of stuff only for low-paying, non-profit institutions where he thinks he's helping the community. He once tried working for "the nation's largest mortgage lender" (now defunct) but that ended badly.

The Original Dr. Diatribe

Jim once read in a long-forgotten magazine that you can tell what your dream job is by asking yourself, "What did I like doing most when I was 11?" For him the answer beyond all contradiction is, "Draw cartoons." While kicking himself that it had never entered his mind that drawing cartoons can be a job, Dr. Diatribe suddenly popped into Jim's head fully formed and dragged several other characters with him. At approximately the same instant, Jim was laid off from his accounting job back in 2001.


Having some time on his hands while searching for gainful employment, Jim began sketching Doctor Diatribe and trying to figure out what to do with him. At first, Doc was just a mascot for a site featuring brilliant, scathing, satirical articles rivaling The Onion, accompanied by devilishly clever photoshopped illustrations. But the world said, "Meh." At this point Doc demanded his own full-fledged comic strip. This idea actually had some success and was featured on a (now defunct) European humor site.


Jim continued producing his strip after he found a new low-paying, non-profit job, drawing in early mornings, late nights, lunches, and weekends. Eventually though, his life-force was sucked away by overtime, while Doc became increasingly disillusioned with some of his rants. A mutual hiatus was agreed upon. Doc wondered obscure corners of the globe searching for deeper philosophical truth; Jim moved to the IT Department.


In the end though, Jim found that SQL code atrophies the right side of his brain. He also concluded that nothing gives him more simple joy than drawing peculiar cartoons. Hence, the return of Doctor Diatribe.