Behind the Books – 19

Along with the Crankshaft collections that Andrews McMeel was bringing out, they also published the first collection of some of my mature, or maybe let’s call it, adult work. I had been writing a series about Crankshaft’s next door neighbor, Lillian McKenzie, being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and it was getting a nice response from readers. The decision was made to have the material collected into a book that would be called Safe Return Home, and it was the first to collect my work in hardcover. Chuck Ayers, the artist on Crankshaft had done a beautiful job bringing a difficult subject to life, Andrews McMeel put together a beautifully designed and packaged book. They also interspersed some the wonderful emails that I had received from readers commenting on the work as it ran in the papers. All in all, it was a terrific hardcover collection of some of the best work that Chuck and I had done to date on Crankshaft.