When King Features was shopping Lisa’s Story to the New York book companies, two of the publishers they approached were Penguin Putnam and NBM. NBM was and is a publisher of graphic arts collections, and was a pretty small operation at the time. So when Penguin Putnam opted to publish Lisa’s Story under their Perigee imprint, I figured NBM was at that point out of the picture, but they still showed some interest in putting out a Funky book of some kind. It seemed their thinking was that a Funky collection could ride on the coattails of a successful Lisa’s Story volume. I was given complete freedom to put together whatever I wanted, so I chose to put together work that would amount to a prequel to Lisa’s Story.
Because I was now writing the strip in discrete story arcs, it was easy to pull the work into book collections that appeared to be unique stand-alone narratives. In fact, NBM’s publisher, Terry Nantier, said that the book read like a graphic novel. Having just been through the book shopping experience, ‘Could be a Book Deal Here’ seemed like an obvious title. I had also begun working with the comic book colorist Lee Loughridge on the Funky Sundays, and his coloring on this title’s cover gave it very nice professional look.
I was very happy with the book, but it didn’t do well. NBM did no real promotion for it, and when the Perigee collection of Lisa’s Story suffered a similar fate, it pretty much sank from sight without a trace.
Except… down the road, the NBM book, along with additional material, would eventually comprise the book Prelude which would be published as a part of the Lisa’s Legacy Trilogy.
