By day, he leads an ordinary life. He works as a network engineer at Berk-Tek, a cable manufacturing company in New Holland.
He comes home for dinner, kisses his wife and tucks in his two children.
But during the night, he spends time with his other family — of the black-and-white, three-inch-tall variety.
By night, Witmer pens the adventures of a giant-headed know-it-all named Jasper, along with a handful of other everyday superheroes tugging the family dynamic to its cartoonish extreme.
The alter egos are loosely — very loosely, Witmer insists — based on his family shenanigans, which for the past two-and-a-half years have been caricatured on the pages of the New Era in a daily strip called “44 Union Avenue.”
Last week, the locally grown cartoon burst into national syndication on Universal’s GoComics.com Web site. It now features Witmer’s regular strip every day and a color cartoon on Sundays.
Suddenly, world domination — going full time with his cartoon illustrations — seems within Witmer’s reach.
At “44 Union Avenue — where the scariest people are your friends,” Witmer writes on his MySpace Web site, an advice columnist and single mother of two doles out parenting advice but lives in perpetual confusion when it comes to her own kids.
To be fair, Jasper and Jesse are rather bewildering. Jesse parades around with a stuffed bear called Mingo, who she swears is her “center .. her silent voice of reason.”
The mischievous Jasper, whose misguided and egomaniacal (read: evil) dog Jack adds an extra bit of spice to his mother’s disciplinary showcase, is another story altogether.
Jasper was named Mikey until a few months ago, as in Mikey Witmer. Witmer’s sister in the cartoon and in real life is named Jesse, and his mother is Cheryl-Ann.
“They’ve become their own characters,” Witmer said, explaining his decision to rename the protagonist. “I’m not trying to chronicle anybody else’s life.”
Try or not, Witmer’s strip does hold an ink-stained mirror to other people’s daily affairs.
“I’ve had so many people call me up and say, ‘Do you have a camera at my house?’” Witmer said.
That quality is what first attracted the New Era’s editor, Ernest Schreiber, to peek inside “44 Union Avenue” in July 2004. It was Witmer’s first shot at the big time.
“I thought, give the guy a shot and see what he can do,” Schreiber said.
“It was so unexpected,” Witmer recalled.
Before that, the artistic joker mainly had caricatured his friends and dabbled in editorial cartoons for military publications during his 10-year stint in the Air Force.
A daily strip was a brand-new adventure.
So he drew what he knew — home.
“Jasper, can I talk to you about that picture you drew?” Cheryl-Ann asks her two-dimensional son in one cartoon. “The person in the T-Rex’s jaws.... umm... is that me?”
“You’ve degraded a fine work of art!” Jasper shrieks. “And besides, anyone can plainly see that you’re the dinosaur. You couldn’t tell by the big, poofy hair?”
The cartoon Cheryl-Ann looks unamused.
But in real life, Witmer’s mother is “without a doubt my biggest fan.”
The real Cheryl-Ann won’t peek at a strip until it hits the papers, and she proudly displays her son’s originals at her New Holland house, on 44 Union Avenue.
CONTACT US: alitvak@LNPnews.com or 481-6020 
