Noah Voelker was in sixth grade when he was at Rural King one day and saw refrigerator magnets with funny things on them.

He thought he wanted to try to make something similar, and when he came up with a funny thought, he wrote it down on a note card.

Over time, he wound up with a stack of about 200 note cards.

After he graduated from Trinity Lutheran High School in Seymour in 2020 and arrived on campus at Purdue University in West Lafayette, he attended a callout meeting for the student-run newspaper, Purdue Exponent. This was his chance to finally get his hand-drawn comics published.

Shortly after starting at Purdue, Voelker had one of his comics in print.

“I was super excited,” the 22-year-old recently said. “I always thought it would be cool to have it printed, and I’ve got the whole stack of newspapers, every issue that I’ve been printed in.”

Voelker wound up with quite the stack of newspapers as he continued contributing comics on a weekly basis until graduating Dec. 16.

“A lot of my comics over the first three years I started doing it at Purdue are from things that I came up with when I was in elementary school at White Creek,” he said, referring to the Lutheran school he attended from sixth to eighth grade.

“I just continued to come up with stuff, and so I had that stack (of note cards), and that’s where I started, but I never had any reason to make anything more,” he said. “I never did this, actually inking it, until I started working for the Purdue Exponent.”

Voelker said he became interested in comic strips when he was in elementary school. One time, he received a Merriam-Webster dictionary with a “Garfield” comic strip on every page as a game prize.

“After that, every time I went to the library, I would check out books of comics, like ‘Peanuts’ and ‘Garfield’ and ‘The Wizard of Id’ and stuff, so I was really into cartoons,” he said. “When I would go to my grandparents’ place, I think they get The Tribune and The Republic, so I would read all of the comics.”

While he always doodled as a kid, Voelker said he didn’t start drawing his own one-panel gags until sixth grade.

Going into college, he chose general management as his major because he thought it would be a good utility major and open a lot of doors, but he didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career.

A couple of years in, he decided to switch to marketing because it seemed to be more interesting, but his adviser said it made sense to add it as a second major.

Voelker’s long-term goal was to work in marketing, and his dream job was being a syndicated cartoonist.

“That’s something that I would love to do, but I know that that’s a tough route, and newspapers in general, it’s tough to get in,” he said. “You have to get syndicated to get into the comics, but that would be a dream job. Realistically, something in marketing.”

Initially, Voelker provided comics for the Exponent twice a week, as the newspaper printed on Mondays and Thursdays. At some point his sophomore year, he realized the workload for his major was too much to continue that, so he switched to once a week.

He also created rebus, a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and individual letters, for a while until the newspaper decided to discontinue it.

“Most of my ideas for the comics came to me when I’m not paying very good attention in class,” Voelker said, smiling. “I’ll either write on my notebook or type it on my notes app, and then when I get back from class, I’ll sketch it out on a note card and then put that note card on my stack. Then I pencil it, and then I do outlines and I erase the pencil from under that, do the shading and then do the final outlining.”

At the start, Voelker’s comic strip was called “The B Side,” referring to the B side of a cassette. After realizing it sounded like he was ripping off a huge inspiration of his, Gary Larson’s comic strip “The Far Side,” he changed it to “Thirty Cubits.”

“Thirty cubits is just one of the measurements when Noah built the ark in Genesis,” Voelker said.

His comics were mostly one-panel gags, so there was no plot or character to follow.

“I’ve gotten feedback from my desk editor that a couple of them probably missed the mark a little bit, but for the most part, I like to think that mine are the funniest in the paper,” Voelker said, smiling. “It’s intended to be funny. I think the Exponent allows a little bit of a stray from the PG realm, but I like to keep mine PG because most of them, I end up showing to my parents, grandparents and cousins.”

As far as other people on campus, Voelker said a lot of them didn’t know he was the creator.

“I’m in a fraternity. All of the guys in the house know I do it,” he said. “I’ve gotten Snapchats and texts from people sending me a picture of my own comic in the paper, ‘I didn’t know you did this.’ Recently, the pastor of the church I go to on campus said he saw it and didn’t realize I’d been doing it this whole time. A couple friends have sent me pictures. They didn’t know I did it. It’s really cool to get recognized like that.”

During his time at Purdue, Voelker said it was very fulfilling to see his work in the newspaper. That will benefit him as he presents his portfolio for potential job opportunities.

“I think having been circulated in the student paper is definitely helpful,” he said. “If I want to get more serious about it, I need to start looking at posting comics online. It’s tough because I know for the most part, comics are drawn nowadays at least electronically, and I’m really terrible with digital art. I do it all with pen and paper, so I need to look into doing stuff online.”

Now that he has finished college, Voelker plans to work as an office administrator at Andrea Hall’s Edward Jones office in Seymour until he walks in the Purdue graduation ceremony in the spring and gets married to Anna Benter in the summer. Then they will be moving to Canada. Benter is a deaconess and will be serving a two-year internship at a church before going through the call process.

Voelker said he’s still working on what he’s going to be doing after they move, trying to figure a career out.

“I still need to do more research on what it would take to get into this business,” he said of becoming a syndicated cartoonist. “Realistically, that should probably not be Plan A for me. From what I understand, I would have to get a pretty big deal or be printed in a lot of newspapers before I could make it my career. But if I can work on this bit by bit as I have, whatever my other career ends up being, then hopefully, I can make this my career someday.”