Match to Flame 190

It’s always good to get the house rules sorted out early, so how about if we not horse around and just deal with the elephant in the intro right out of the gate? Show of hands? Okay, we’re good. If you’re the kind of person who, like me, leafs through a collection like this as soon as they get it, then, spoiler warnings be damned, you already know that I’m talking about the death of Lisa Moore. It’s the type of thing that casts an understandable shadow over the rest of the book. When I wrote the preface to the book Lisa’s Story, it was short and to the point (I must not have been feeling well, but I’m confident I can make up for that here), but then so was the book. The strips collected in Lisa’s Story were carved out of the daily newspaper run of Funky Winkerbean, and in the process the context was necessarily stripped out. Otherwise, it would have been a book the size of . . . this one. This book, which collects all of the strips, returns the context to Lisa’s battle with cancer, allowing it to weave around and in between the other stories told here. It helps to convey the feeling that events were almost happening in real time. The essence and the beauty of a newspaper comic strip is that it would show up each day in readers’ lives so that they could almost experience the narratives one heartbeat at a time.

From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Vol. 12