Scarred for life by a horrifically embarrassing childhood event? Get over it by letting the world laugh with you at PatheticGeekStories.com. Comic strip artist and Onion staff writer Maria Schneider illustrates the most cringe-worthy stories sent to her by (former) pathetic geeks and then posts them at her year-old site. The result is a collection of adolescent anecdotes unmatched in their ability to simultaneously inspire sympathetic queasiness and laughter. With its tales of Metallica-loving fat-asses, Superman-costume-wearing kite rescuers, and daydreaming schoolbus singers, Schneider's Pathetic Geek Stories become addictive reminders of the agonies of trying to fit into the "normal" world.

How did you come up with the idea for Pathetic Geek Stories?

I’d been drawing the strip for a little over 10 years before that. It ran in The Onion for a long time. How did I come up with the idea? It was sort of a combination of wanting to draw a comic strip, but not wanting to come up with a story and having to agonize over that every week. I think it came out of just talking with my friends a lot about our pathetic childhoods, and I thought the stories could make a funny comic strip -- albeit a very anti-climactic comic strip.

Had you drawn comics before this one?

I had done some cartoons for the college paper. I’ve been drawing for pretty much most of my life. I sometimes do some illustrations for The Onion, and recently did some work for The Daily Show’s book, but PGS is pretty much the biggest cartoon that I do.

Do you have your own personal Pathetic Geek Story?

I do have one that’s pretty horrible and I drew it years ago. I mean, it’s pretty psychotic -- it kind of shows the lengths at which kids will go to try to be popular or get friends’ approval. When I was 12, in 7th grade, I had a social studies teacher who was goofy looking, for lack of a better word. But a perfectly nice guy. There were these girls in my class who were kind of bitchy and mean, but they also ran hot and cold at the same time – sometimes they’d act like they’d be my friends, other times they didn’t. Not really having any alternatives – and I didn’t even really like these people very much – I thought I had to fit in some way. So I decided to use my drawing skill to win over their friendship. We would make fun of this poor teacher and also this other girl who was in our grade, and I drew this really nasty comic about them having a sexual relationship in all these weird positions. I didn’t even know what I was doing – it just came out from my deep subconscious. I was passing the comic around to these girls and they were chuckling at it – but then some other guy in the class got a hold of it and he put it on that teacher’s desk. I, of course, flipped out. I managed to get it back in time, but I ended up destroying the comic and those girls never became my friends anyway. That’s pretty psycho.

Do you ever get stories that you feel are too pathetic to use?

If anything, I think the problem with some of my submissions is that they don’t go far enough. I think they're almost a little too conventional. You can understand why farting in class would be an embarrassing thing, especially if you’re doing it in front of your crush. But it’s not as interesting as some of the other things I have on the site; some of them go a little deeper. If anything, I think the readers hold out a bit. I wish they would really send in some nasty stuff. I think they feel like they’re revealing themselves enough, and I really appreciate people writing me – to take time off from their day to tell me this embarrassing story about their life. Most of the stories are quite endearing, actually. There are some that are depressing, and a couple that are revolting, but they do have that undercurrent of decency to them.

Why do you think people want to share their most embarrassing moments with you?

I think people see the site and they get sort of a cathartic feeling out of it, like “I wasn’t the only one who was like this when I was a kid,” or “I’m not the only adult who’s like this, either.” Most people who write me and tell me they like the strip cite that as a specific reason why they submit. At my peak, I was getting around a couple dozen submissions [a week] – that’s a lot of embarrassing, sad stories to read. And sometimes I can only read a few at a time before I have to stop. I mean, I have to read everything unedited, unfiltered.

What are the elements that make for a great Pathetic Geek Story?

I think some of the better stories deal with people who are trying to overcome their geeky situation by trying to be something they’re not, trying to affect a certain attitude or belief system that belongs to somebody else. And then it ends up just completely blowing up in their face, really backfiring. Some of the geeks in the stories are clearly victims – fate is unkind to them – but then some of them are agents of their own undoing. I think those stories are the more interesting ones than just, “I got beat up.” Well, why did you get beat up? “I didn’t deserve to get beat up, but I sort of did something that kind of led to it.”

Do you ever worry that some of these submissions might be fakes?

I do worry about that. I use the honor system and hope that people are straightforward with me. I think the fact that I only run a fraction of the stories that I get kind of helps insure that I’m not doing fake ones, or so I hope. Another thing I do is, if I get a story I like, I write the person back and I ask them a lot of questions about it: “Clarify this in your story,” “What did you look like at the time,” that kind of thing. Most people who send me a story that I’m interested in will write me back and give me all these details, so I glean from that that they’re on the level.

Have people put these incidents behind them, or do you think they’re still obsessed by them?

Geek stories are the stories that everybody remembers, but either don’t want to tell or don’t know exactly how to tell them because they can be so weird or bizarre. I think they’re the types of stories that you don’t even want to tell your friends, because you just know that they’ll use them against you in some way. So I think the strip is a nice way to be able to do that – you can also submit your stories anonymously.

The pain is still there, definitely, but they also a sense of humor about it, in general. That’s what’s cool about most of my readers – they get it: “This really scarred me when I was a teenager, but reading these stories, maybe I can finally get over this.” It’s not like they’re terribly tragic stories. I don’t do anything too horrible – it does have that element of black humor to it.

So has the strip become part of the healing process for some of these people?

I hope so. I gotta say, that wasn’t the original reason why I started the strip – I just wanted to do something every week that was kind of different and funny. I didn’t create the strip to make fun of these people, but at the same time I can’t deny getting sort of a charge out of their stories. I do laugh at their misfortune, I’ve got to admit – not in a ridiculing way, but I do see what’s funny about it. I think you have to, otherwise you have no sense of humor and life’s just a big slog for you.