Cory Thomas hopes readers of The Augusta Chronicle will like him.

If not him, at least his work.

Actually, that is his hope of the people in each city where a newspaper is taking a chance on his new comic strip, Watch Your Head, which follows the lives of six freshmen at Oliver Otis University.

"These are freshmen going into college, into a new environment having new experiences," Mr. Thomas said in a recent phone interview. "They could easily lose themselves or whatever, but it's best that they watch their head."

The Chronicle will start a trial run of the strip Monday on the main comics page. The comic strip Lio will move to the back page of the daily comic section to replace the comic strip The Boondocks, which has been discontinued by its syndicate.

Mr. Thomas said Watch Your Head is carried in 12 papers, with trial runs in more.

Mr. Thomas, 31, is a mechanical engineering graduate student at Howard University, where he got his undergraduate degree in the same major.

Howard provides some fodder for the script, which features main character Cory, a book-smart, sarcastic, socially awkward teen who was excited about being around other smart, mature people in college - only to find many people similar to the high school peers he was ready to leave behind.

Mr. Thomas said the character is loosely based on himself.

"That's pretty much me making fun of myself. That's kind of an exaggerated version of me," Mr. Thomas said. "He's wimpier than I am, nerdier than I am and smarter than I am."

Cory's classmates include a wannabe tough-guy roommate who is so obsessed with street culture that he dresses like a thug and pretends he's not from the suburbs; an equally sarcastic and computer-nerd best friend; a Canadian comic-book geek who is a minority on the predominantly black campus; a womanizing preacher's son; and a popular girl who's the object of Cory's infatuation but who rarely realizes Cory exists.

"Mostly, I would take different pieces of different people's personalities that I knew, but none of them are really based on any actual person," Mr. Thomas said.

He's a self-trained artist who grew up in Trinidad and has been drawing since age 6.

Coming up with the dialogue takes so much time that he dreams about the characters, he said.

The strip started when Mr. Thomas was the editorial cartoonist for Howard's newspaper, The Hilltop, but was rarely used, so he eventually submitted it to syndicates and he signed with The Washington Post Writers Group.

Now he's hoping enough papers will pick it up so he can afford to focus solely on Watch Your Head without the need for a day job.

Mr. Thomas cautions new readers to not compare the strip to Aaron McGruder's Boondocks.

"The way that some newspapers are introducing it is like as a replacement for The Boondocks, so people say, 'OK, a new black strip,' and they're going to try to judge it based on what was there before," he said. "People are going to be looking for Boondocks in it, and they're going to be looking for something they won't find.

"I tried to touch some little social issues, but it's not a really overtly political strip or a strip of any kind of real hard stance, so people look at it and it's like, 'Oh, this isn't The Boondocks; it's watered down,' and it's really not trying to be The Boondocks.

"Just because there are black characters, people categorize it as a black strip and try to compare it to like Boondocks. I just want to be given a fair chance."

Reach C. Samantha McKevie at (706) 823-3552 or samantha.mckevie@augustachronicle.com.