I had rushed home to write down my series of revelations thoughts before I forgot them, and the first thing I pulled from those notes was a story about Lisa being diagnosed with breast cancer. I realized from the start that this was a story that couldn’t be written under my normal deadline of six weeks and that it was also going to run on the comics page longer than anything I had written before. When I was starting out on Funky, I was given some advice along these lines:
- Always put your best jokes on a Monday or Friday because those were the days when you had the highest readership.
- And, if I wanted to run a related series of ideas, they could run in the middle of the week.
- An actual story should not run more than three weeks tops.
What I had in mind just wasn’t going to jibe with those strictures, and, in truth, I hadn’t been paying any heed to them for quite some time. But this new work was going to push things even further, and the second part of it would run for an entire year. It was necessary, however, in order for the work to unfold in a more naturalistic time frame as befitted what I was now trying to achieve.
From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 10
