Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/05/bogus-professor-marvin-hewitt.html
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He then went on to create Tank Girl in the 80s.
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Reminds me of a textbook situation. There’s an incredibly common textbook used for computer science 1 where the author claims to be a teacher at $college. He’s not on their faculty list, and when you search the college’s news for his name you’ll see that he was once recognized by the school as a “notable alumni” but that’s it.
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And I can’t even find one tenure track position, nearby, in my field… 
Sounds like an interesting story!
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Grifters were content with small potatoes back in the 50’s. This guy didn’t even try to become president of the United States.
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Is the lead photo of MSU in Bozeman?
You mean Jamie Hewlett? Or did I miss a joke here?
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Half a joke. The original issues were credited to (Alan) Martin and (Jamie) Hewlett. Which is close enough to “Marvin Hewitt” if you like creating dorky puns for attention.
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google says it’s “the university of Utah”
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When I was a sophomore, I had a terrible Spanish III prof who’d been teaching in the department for about four or five years. The following semester it was discovered he’d faked all his credentials. This was before background checks were internet easy mind you, but still, you’d think someone could learn to teach Spanish competently after half a decade.
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The 1990s tech columnist Mark Stephens (who used to go by Roger X. Cringley) used to claim he had been a professor at Stanford, but it turned out he just was a doctoral student there for a while and TAed some classes before dropping out.
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He actually still goes by that, I read his blog sometimes. There was a lawsuit when he left InfoWorld regarding the “Robert X Cringely” name but it was resolved: he can use the name but apparently InfoWorld gets to use it too.
Lately he’s been up to being blind and running an arguably fraudulent kickstarter: he and his kids started one 2 years ago to basically make little arm boards that run minecraft servers, last update he gave was 7 months ago and it was basically “Well we ran out of money so we’re a startup now”
In his book Catch Me If You Can, former con artist Frank Abagnale claims to have taught at my old university for a semester, while also scamming the patrons of the campus-adjacent bank with doctored deposit slips. The school denies it, however.
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