The Doctor is in

It’s not every day you see a Doctor that draws comic strips on the side.  We all know that they are usually at hospitals or clinics taking care of patients and stuff like that. Not Dr. Carlo Jose San Juan MD though. A certified Physician, he’d rather captivate you with his skills as an artist than writing medical prescriptions that only doctors can read.

Drawing comic strips is entirely a different medium as opposed to comic books like Spider-Man and Batman. In retrospect, those titles mentioned started off in comic strip form before it changed into a comic book format as we know it today. Producing a single comic strip daily is never an easy task.  For Callous Comics creator Dr. San Juan, it was much easier to produce new material for daily comic strips if the subject is pretty much about your life.

Perhaps being a Physician with an artistic side is actually cool though.

Eccentric Flair: Was Callous Comics published independently before?

Dr. Carlo Jose San Juan MD:  It has a very early roots and it started in 1996 in a student newspaper of De La Salle University. Back then it was a college situation comedy. Once I get into Med School, that’s when I changed the theme and it became more of a Medical Themed Comedy. So the main character is a doctor named Dr. Rianne Nicah and she happens to have a guardian duck named Cal-Duck.

So what he’s there to do is to help guide her to become the best person she could be. Because during her time as a med student and as a beginning Physician all she does is work and study – she never really discovered herself or the world around her.

So like that part of her life – both within and outside of the medical field -- being a doctor myself, a lot of my experiences as a Physician has applied to the writing of the series.

Eccentric Flair: So Callous Comics is literally about your life, right?

Dr. Carlo Jose San Juan MD: Yes, a lot of introspection of my decision to go into Medicine and my appreciation of the medical field. But basically I went through a phase of trying to find my purpose in life. A lot of my thoughts about that have come out on the comic strip.

Eccentric Flair: What made you decide to publish comics independently?

Dr. Carlo Jose San Juan MD: There came a time when I thought that it would be as far as I can go. I was very fortunate that one of the major newspapers picked up the series. Since then, I’ve treated it as a second profession and not so much as a hobby anymore.

Eccentric Flair: How did you get started as a comic strip artist in College?

Dr. Carlo Jose San Juan MD: I just wanted to see if I had what it takes to become a comic strip artist, if I could be able to keep coming up with material and on time for it to be published and if the editors found it nice enough and good enough to be published.

After my time in student newspapers, I published it online at CallousComics.com. Over there, the nice thing about it being a web comic is you get instant feedback from readers. I have an area below on each comic strip where you can read a comment and also comments on other social media outlets. So it just kept telling me that “Okay, I might be pretty good at this.”

So I sent a pitch to a newspaper, fortunately they thought the same thing. One thing lead to another and now it’s in the newspaper.

Eccentric Flair: Is it really hard to produce new material for a daily comic strip?

Dr. Carlo Jose San Juan MD: It’s definitely a challenge to do a daily comic strip. But writing a comic strip is quite different because it’s a very short script for that instalment. So I think the trick is to do what you know. Like in my case, thoughts about the medical practice and of life in general, that’s what yields the stories for each comic strip.

Doing stories on what I know, what I experience – doing that makes it a whole lot easier to come out with material for each comic strip.