The first strip that Chuck penciled for Funky featured the diaphanous Susan Smith. With Susan, I was finally going to start digging deeper and take her character on a roller-coaster ride of changes. Susan’s beginnings in the strip, however, were initially to provide a counterpoint to Cindy Summers’s sister Sadie, the new most popular girl in the school. Susan by contrast was the most invisible girl in the school. Clever, but basically a one-note character. However, I was about to drop her into the middle of a long-ongoing story arc where she would become an opera.
From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 8