‘WASP MALE: Semi-Autobiographical Fiction and Lies’

I meet Griffin Mauser in front of his house as he’s hand-watering his garden. He’s dressed in a Tribe Comics t-shirt, plus a straw hat flecked with colorful buttons and one jaunty feather. Though his grass is parched, his yard contains an impressive riot of green and blooming things — all natives, which he proceeds to tell me about as he greets me with a hug — because even though we haven’t met face to face in years, he remembers that plants are an interest we share.

Mauser, comic book artist and author of “WASP MALE: Semi-autobiographical Fiction and Lies,” brings a new level of meaning to the term Jack of All Trades. While living in San Marcos, he spent 16 years as a middle school English teacher. He’s a theater performer who has worked as a counselor for Camp Half-Blood. He’s a muralist, an apprentice baker, a landscaper, and he sews his own clothes. His house, which he’s “painted like a Mexican birthday cake,” is like an outward expression of his personality, as is the garden that surrounds it. Bits of found art objects decorate the front lawn and pergola — wine bottles, sun catchers, bleached animals skulls.

As we’re talking, a pair of Monarchs light upon a massive Pride of Barbados, leading us down a foxtrail about different kinds of migratory butterflies. Then before we know it, we’re in the car, heading for breakfast at Kerbey Lane, and before I realize it, the conversation has hair-pinned to his latest hobby, which is re-reading classic novels, but in Spanish: “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells (“La Maquina del Tiempo”) and Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” (“Orgullo y prejuicio”). As it happens, Griffin and his wife, Shawn, are planning to move to Costa Rica when they retire, so they’re brushing up on the language before they move.

In the 10 minutes it takes to drive the distance between Mauser’s house and Kerbey Lane, we meander smoothly from linguistics and literature to the Bible and then, somehow, to parkour.

And I recall something about Mauser from the time we used to commute together as teachers at Parades Middle School to San Marcos: Griffin Mauser is interesting.

Griffin Mauser has the kind of quiet genius that doesn’t flaunt how deep his genius runs. Like Tyrion Lannister, he knows things. Lots of things. Put him on any conversational footpath, and he can walk it, and it does it in a way that enlightens and entertains. Mauser draws from a wealth of experience and a lifetime of curiosity, imbued with the understanding that there is nothing he can’t learn how to do if he wants to learn how to do it.

Which is what makes “WASP MALE” so intriguing, because now he’s writing about his vast and varied lifetime of experience, one for which he feels particularly fortunate.

“All I am is an experience,” Mauser said. “I had a fantasy life. I had a white man’s life in a white man’s world. That’s the kind of stuff I want to write about: Being white and having privilege. People say, ‘Oh no, I don’t have privilege, and I’m like, ‘No, you do, man. You do.’ There are a lot of things I realize I just took for granted. I didn’t realize people were suffering so bad. I know better now. And I thought, I know there’s a lot of white man’s stories, but I’m going to try to focus on helping. That’s what I want it to be about.”

Mauser is self-producing the indie comic series with a Kickstarter campaign featuring three levels of backers: Subscription level for $5, Convention level for $20 and Creator level for $50 which includes an original signed sketch by Mauser, a signed copy of WASP MALE #1 and an original art page.

“The book is mostly semi-autobiographical fiction and lies,” Mauser said. “Anything I make up that I like, I put in there.”

This includes a Roadrunner/ Coyote-esque comedy about the Dillo Bat, half-armadillo, halfbat being pursued by a mariachi band called He’s chased by a mariachi band called Los Churangos.

“A churango is a guitar made out of an armadillo’s body,” Mauser explained. “So they’re chasing him down, trying to get it.”

Another story, Creepy Romance, ventures into more Black Mirror territory.

“It’s about this guy who takes this girl home for the weekend, “Mauser said. “The grackles are murmuring at her, and it freaks her out because she’s hated grackles her whole life and they hate her. When she was a child, she was in the forest swinging a stick around. A chick fell out of the nest and she smacked it. It was horribly traumatizing, but the birds remember…” To get copies of “Wasp Male,” visit the Kickstarter page at kck.st/44PpZPb or by keyword searching Kickstarter WASP MALE. The campaign runs until Oct. 11.