They don’t really look alike, but everyone knows they’re related.
Otersen, the artist, began as a childhood cartoonist taking inspiration from the Peanuts comic strips of Charles Shultz and early issues of Mad Magazine. Every Halloween he’d turn cardboard mattress boxes into creepy haunted houses to entertain his friends. Who could imagine he had the makings of a high school misfit and college dropout? Right here in Tallahassee. Mad gave way to underground comics, the haunted houses developed into life-sized cardboard cutouts and Otersen received his Commercial Art Degree.

The big-nose, big-foot punk everyone knows as Mister Stupid came on the scene once upon a time when there was nothing to do but gyrate with the Slut Boys. This beloved local punk group created the song that named him. The band is now just a wisp of memory, but Otersen took Mister Stupid the character to work at the Florida Flambeau when he was art director there. The strips ran as a regular Flambeau feature initially from 1982-1987.

Tallahassee knows Bill Otersen as a dedicated bicyclist and constantly sketching observer of the human scene. He also spent a few years doing those things in New York City. These days, we find him freelancing as stupid studio pushing the buttons of PhotoShop, Painter and Freehand , allies from the realm of electrons.