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8 Street roots Jan. 4, 2013 Semper ‘Terminal Lance’ strip writer Maximilian Uriarte talks about poking fun at a very serious institution BY ROBERT BRITT STAFF WRITER ew will say that courage is in short supply in the Marine Corps, and for Marine veteran Maximilian Uriarte, his display of courage came in a strange form — a comic strip. Uriarte is the creator of the Terminal Lance webcomic, which candidly depicts military life as seen through the eyes of the lower-enlisted. The comic lampoons military culture and fires well-aimed barbs to highlight the day-to-day frustrations faced by many in uniform. Named in homage of the many Marine infantrymen who never see a promotion beyond the rank of lance corporal, Terminal Lance launched as Uriarte’s pet project and has grown to be the unofficial Corps comic. In addition to self-publishing on terminallance.com, where he attracts about 3 million page views a month and has nearly 63,000 “likes” on Facebook, Uriarte writes exclusive strips for P H O T O B Y R O B E R T B R IT T the Marine Corps 1 thlitfe what the people Times newspaper. He really like about Terminal also recently began iaitee as that my perspective working on another webcomic, Into the was never about hating the Mangrove, with fellow Marine Corps or just being artist Brad Hock. angry« It was about genuine Originally from problems and being honest Corvallis and later moving to Portland, about II/" Uriarte enlisted in — M A X IM IL IA N U R IAR TE 2006 as an infantryman, was trained as an infantry assaultman and assigned to 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines in Hawaii. He served two tours in Iraq, in 2007 and 2009, and launched the Terminal Lance webcomic in January 2010 before getting out of the service later that year. Now he attends the California College of the Arts in Oakland. While in Portland over the holidays, the 26-year-old Uriarte talked with Street Roots about his work, its success, and his life after the Marine Corps. F M A X I M I L IA N U R IA R T E uniform every day? M axim ilian Uriarte: It was really nerve- wracking at first. I didn’t know if I was going to get in trouble because, you know how the military is, you can get in trouble for anything. So I was always waiting for that call to go talk to the battalion sergeant major. And I actually did, I had to go talk to the regimental sergeant major one time, after probably about strip 20 or so, I think it was right after the story broke in the Marine Corps Times. It started getting more popular and the regimental sergeant major wanted to talk to me, which is a huge, nerve-racking thing. But the sergeant major was actually really cool. He was a fan of it, and he just wanted to kind of warn me and tell me to be careful. I guess it was cool doing it while I was still in. That only went up to about strip 35, I think, before I got out. Now I’m up to 242 as of Friday, plus another 100 exclusive strips in the Marine Corps Times. R.B.: How is your relationship with the Marine Times? M.U.: They’re great. It’s fun working with them because with my website I just do whatever I want. But then when I submit a strip to them they might say, “Oh, this one isn’t going to work this week because we have a cover story that’s conflicting with your strip and we don’t want people to think we’re making fun of this.” So it’s a little more unpredictable for me. Because with the webcomic, obviously I just put it out there and it doesn’t matter what I do. R.B.: How much censorship do you experience doing it for the Marine Corps Times, whether it be internally or from external influences? M.U.: I wouldn’t call it censorship. Well, I guess it is, but there are just some things I can’t do. I can’t use the f-word or “shit” or whatever else — all the other words that are part of my everyday vocabulary. It’s really not too bad. They kind of let me do pretty much anything, it’s just if it conflicts with some cover story they’re doing or something. I did one about gun control last week, which was a little too soon, I think. I think we all kind of agreed that it was too soon for that, so they wouldn’t publish it. But I agreed with them on that one. Yeah, it was a little too soon. R.B.: How would you describe your success with Terminal Lance? Robert Britt: You were publishing Terminal Lance while you were still in the Marine Corps? How was that, doing a strip that lampoons a lot o f military and Marine culture while you were still putting on the M.U.: I get between 50,000 to 100,000 hits a day. It’s been good, I guess. It’s not so much that I make that much money off of it, but it’s opened a lot of doors for me. Over the summer I worked on an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie doing storyboarding. The director, David Ayer, just came out with “End of Watch” and a couple other films in the last couple of years. He’s former Navy, and after he saw Terminal Lance he asked if I wanted to work on a movie with him and I said, of course! Why wouldn’t I? So I went to Hollywood for a few weeks and they hooked me up with my own office and everything. It was a lot of fun. I got to meet Arnold. I’ve got a photo with him too, actually, and the director gave me this grand introduction. He talked me up. R.B.: So what’s next? M.U.: The immediate goal is to put out my Terminal Lance graphic novel, which is a full-length narrative story of Abe and Garcia, the two main characters. I’m hoping to get that published through Image Comics or somebody else. Image does “The Walking Dead” and some other pretty big names. So I’m hoping to get it published through them, and if not them then some other label at least around the same size. And if that brings in enough money, I want to ultimately start my own animation studio and do my own animations. I have a couple other websites in mind and some little things that are boiling in my head. R.B.: What was your inspiration for staring Terminal Lance and what was your initial goal with it? M.U.: When I came back from Iraq the first time, I tried to laterally move over to a combat photographer job, but my battalion commander wouldn’t let me because he didn’t want to let go of an assaultman, a senior one at that point. So I didn’t get to, but part of my’deal with the combat camera shop in Hawaii was that I was going to make this comic for the base newspaper and it would just kind of be something I’d do for them. So I thought of Terminal Lance. The actual layout was going to be a full-size comic page layout. But that didn’t happen, at all. That totally fell through. I went to Iraq again and still had the idea in my head and I really wanted to do it. I knew there was no official way I was going to be able to do it, so I just put together a website and I decided to make it a three-panel comic and I launched it on my own. Nobody knew about it back when it launched, so I was printing fliers and business cards. We had card readers on the barracks doors, so I’d put the business cards in the card readers and just leave them there. I’d go to the barracks and plaster up all these posters and stuff. That was way back when I first started, just to See SEM PER, page 9
