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Do you remember the kids in elementary, junior high and high school? Remember the one with the bright future or the sensitive but misunderstood kid? Or the outcast? Do you recall who was the ringleader, the class clown, smarty-pants or the teacher's pet? Did you ever wonder what became of all those schooltime acquaintances?

If you answered yes, are you in luck, because writer/artist Robert Triptow has coaxed his imagination over many years into producing the new graphic novella "Class Photo," which presents the occasionally outrageous, always humorous and completely fictitious back stories of the students appearing in an actual class photo from a New York public school in 1937.

The photograph, which Triptow and his uncle David Jensen found in a Salt Lake City home's trash heap in August 1971, eventually sparked a desire in him to return to his cartoonist roots. In "Class Photo," he envisions what happened to the students in the years since their advancement from elementary education. Jensen contributed specific "facts" about the students and to the book's overall tenor.

Triptow, 63, who grew up in the Salt Lake Valley, left in the late 1970s to pursue the life of an underground comic-book artist and writer in San Francisco. While there, he became one of the earliest contributors to Gay Comics, the history-making anthology from alternative cartoonist, writer and editor Howard Cruse. Triptow eventually succeeded Cruse as editor of Gay Comics, and influences from Triptow's previous works are present in "Class Photo," although the work is not strictly aimed at a LGBT audience. His tenure as Gay Comics editor won Triptow the first Lambda Literary Award for Humor. He was succeeded as editor of Gay Comics by science-fiction author Andy Mangels.

As far as the so-called students from P.S. 49 go, a virtual smorgasbord of life's humor, irony, pretentiousness and luck — good or bad — can be found on all 64 pages of "Class Photo." Each page presents the story of one of the students in the photo, along with many other "students" who apparently were not at school the day the photograph was taken.

A perfunctory look at the P.S. 49 students reveals characters such as Francis Fandango, the boy who literally had two left feet and suffered greatly during school dances and Army cadence drills; the class teacher, Mrs. Goodhen, whose first name no one knew, not even Mr. Goodhen; the triple-threat of the rumormongering character assassins Lotta Mae Twizz, Trudy Tranch and Frymetta F. Shamis, who eventually gossip themselves to near death; Fred N. Ethel, the only person in America with a good enough reason to hate the TV show "I Love Lucy"; and Ricky Renfield, the socially awkward child vampire who, although actually present for the photo session, was listed as "not pictured" because, as everyone knows, vampires cannot be photographed.

As in reality, the lives of the "Class Photo" students interweave to form a somewhat bizarre tapestry, but with an element of innocence and naiveté left intact, due primarily to the humorous way Triptow depicts their mostly tragic stories. And as is often true in reality, no one's life turns out as planned.

In a telephone interview from San Francisco, Triptow said his initial motivation for creating what was to become "Class Photo" was to entertain his friends with jokes about the kids at P.S. 49. "I had the photo framed and hanging in my living room," he explained. "I would point to someone in the photo and say, 'That is Ashtabula Krug. What do you think she does? That's Landa Hoy. No one knows anything about her.' For fun, my friends would then make up what they thought their back stories were." Eventually, Triptow had a single handwritten sheet taped to the back of the photo, naming all the students and their one-liner backgrounds. While he was always involved in various art projects, he began writing and illustrating "Class Photo" in between other comic jobs. He said he eventually used the project to keep his "wrist limber" and to keep from being bored.

"One of the comic panels literally went unfinished for 12 years," he confessed, saying a lot of his time then was taken up remodeling a house in San Francisco's Outer Sunset neighborhood.

But as the years went by, Triptow would return to his project again and again, especially after struggling with cancer and chemotherapy, which he described as a "wakeup call." It was then he said he realized he wasn't going to live forever and could either be angry and bitter about a life with cancer or find the humor in it. Before his cancer, it had still been a difficult time for him. "I was editor of Gay Comics during the height of the AIDS epidemic," Triptow said, adding his life then was a series of "funnies and funerals."

"The world is an absurd place, filled with all kinds of foolishness, and I choose to laugh at it," he said. Triptow agreed that the final version of "Class Photo" was something good that had come out of his battle with cancer.

He said his effort to learn about the actual photograph and the real students of P.S. 49, revealed that during the 1930s, there were at least three schools in the New York boroughs area designated P.S. 49, and none of those schools today have any information about their histories. The buildings they originally occupied are either used for something else or were demolished.

Also, anyone who was part of the Class of 1937 was born around 1926, making them at least 89 years old. "These people are either dead or no longer resemble those images that inspired me," Triptow said. He added that during his search for the truth about P.S. 49, he also learned from a former employee of the New York City Department of Education that a school identified as P.S. 49 had been set aside during the 1930s for refugee children, mostly Germans and European Jews, fleeing the buildup to World War II. He learned, but was unable to substantiate, that almost all the boys from the Class of 1937 ended up enlisting in the U.S. military, where they suffered a high casualty rate.

In the book's foreword, Triptow says "Class Photo" is recommended for "your bathroom, as each page is about the right reading length per sitting and handy if you run out of tissue."

And like any good book about school and education, "Class Photo" features a "pop quiz" at the end, where Mrs. Goodhen demands everyone to "keep their eyes on their papers" and "No Talking!" —

Class reunion

P Utah native Robert Triptow, a former editor of Gay Comics, will be in Salt Lake City to discuss cartooning and to sign copies of his brand-new graphic novella "Class Photo."

When • Monday, 7 p.m.

Where • Utah Pride Center, 255 E. 400 South, Suite 200, Salt Lake City

Tickets • The free event is sponsored by The King's English Bookstore

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Class Photo

By Robert Triptow, with contributions by David Jensen

Fantagraphics Books

Pages • 64

Price • $14.99