When I was college age or so, my friends and I would draw comics about Billy Mouse.
Billy was supposed to be Mickey’s disreputable cousin or something.
The quality of the drawing was awful and the humor was sophomoric.
That was a step up for me since I only ever got to 1 year of college.
If you’re wondering, Billy looks like my blog icon.

The college that I went to, let’s call it H, had a 1 year computer programming program that was divided into 8 6-week classes.
I got into a habit of drawing Billy Mouse cartoons on the blackboards (it was that long ago) whenever no-one else was looking.
Billy started to become a minor, very localized, legend within the class.
When each 6-week class started, we were told to manually check off our names on an attendance list.
We were also told that if our names were missing to write them in.
On one of these occasions, I wrote in Billy Mouse’s name on the list.
It almost worked, but being a private college, they wanted to see some money before they added Billy to the roster.

A couple of months into college, there was an election for student council president. I couldn’t resist.
This was an opportunity to draw Billy Mouse cartoons all over the school’s walls.
I had fun with the campaign slogans. “Cheesed off with the school?”. “Are you man enough to vote Mouse?”
This all had an unfortunate side-effect: I won.
I tried denying it by saying that Billy won, not me.
No one bought it.
I was stuck as student council president.

As the 6-week classes rolled by, new students came in and some of them thought that Billy was a real person.
Others also thought that Steve and Billy were 2 distinct people.
One friend of mine, I’ll call him JW, was talking about me to one of the newbies and was using the names “Billy” and “Steve” interchangeably.
The newby interrupted JW asking “Did you mean Steve or Billy?”

As the years passed, I drew Billy Mouse cartoons as alternate versions of what was going on in my own life.

After a somewhat challenging business trip, I drew up a Billy Mouse version of it and shared it with my co-workers, calling it my travelogue.
Everyone seemed happy with it.
A couple of hours later, the director of IT came by, asking to see my travelogue.
I was terrified.
My co-workers knew this man as a friend and a bit of a goofball.
Since I was pretty new there, I only knew him as a higher up management type.
Fortunately, he really did have a sense of humor and enjoyed the comic.

I haven’t drawn Billy Mouse cartoons for several years now although he often shows up as my profile picture on various sites.