A Jed Waits cartoon from May 2003.Tacoma shooter Jed Waits had a weekly editorial comic strip called “Outcasts” that ran in the Seattle Pacific University student paper The Falcon from fall 2002 to the end of 2003. One early strip, titled “Humility” features his tall, blond, semi-regular protagonist telling a friend: “I dunno which is worse, man…. To be totally isolated from women… Or to be surrounded by them and not having a chance with a single one.” It’s a joke about SPU’s notoriously high female to male ratio. But in hindsight, it hints at Waits’ sense of isolation at his chosen school. I can see how he may have felt alone. He worked for me for an entire school year and I barely remember him.His victim Jennifer Paulsen graduated from SPU in the spring of 2003, as did I. With only 600 or so people in our class, friends and family naturally started asking if I’d known her. Beyond a familiar name and face, no, though many mutual friends who did say she was an exceptional woman. Waits at SPU.The name that rang a bell was Waits’. But it took me more than a week to place it–I was the editor running his comic strips in The Falcon. When I finally remembered, I recalled a quiet, skinny kid who favored hooded sweatshirts, and is pictured grinning in the newspaper staff photo I still have on a dresser at home.Many of the “Outcasts” strips don’t inspire any kind of amateur psychoanalysis. In one a knight faces off against midterms. Another features a Thanksgiving scene before the break, and a third takes potshots at “No Shave November.” Though even in the “No Shave” comic, the blond character tells a friend to stop making fun of his fake beard saying: “Quiet you, I’m trying to attract the ladies.”At times, Waits’ strips had a Christian crusader streak that I didn’t particularly like. In the strip above, a militaristic God stands before a video screen showing atom bombs exploding over the Earth and says “It’s definitely a work in progress.” The final panel of Waits’ Vaquero strip.And during the spring of 2003 Waits did a series with a character called the “Vaquero” that arrives, ugly and scarred, in a southwestern town only to be shot by the Sheriff. The Vaquero is saved by a Gideon Bible kept in his pocket. The Sheriff turns to God. It’s a little weird to say the least, but being an agnostic liberal isn’t a requirement for being on the newspaper’s staff. The one time I asked him to tone down a strip, I don’t remember any kind of fight about it.Waits was a quiet but nice guy in the office. And I was generally happy to run his strips, mostly because he had actual talent and usually made our deadlines. But apparently that feeling of isolation never went away. In a final editorial Waits wrote in Dec. 2003, under a new editor, he said: “To me, SPU is essentially a playground for spoiled rich white quasi-Christians in which students conform to an institutionalized form of Christianity that is–with all intents and purposes–borderline communist, with the ‘state as God’ being, of course, SPU.”There isn’t anything I or anyone else could have done; Waits had clearly gone over an edge. But I am sorry he felt so alone.