After that, King pushed their chips all in with mine and committed themselves to supporting the work along with the fact that I was going to do another time-jump with my characters—the biggest one yet, as a matter of fact. Oh, I hadn’t mentioned that little bit of news earlier? Sorry, I guess I kind of sandbagged you with that one. That’s probably what King thought too. But, once again to give them their due, they did a great job preparing the way for the character change. See, the thing is that after Lisa died, I didn’t want to spend a long time in the strip mourning her. So, I just jumped past all of that and reintroduced my characters in their middle age, along with their now teenaged sons and daughters. The strip had been overdue for a temporal tweaking anyway, and the end of the Lisa’s story arc seemed to provide a logical place for it to happen. Promotion-wise it just made everything more complicated and muddied the water quite a bit, but for the strip and the story it made perfect sense. As I had with the first time-jump, I asked my friend, comic book artist John Byrne, to age my cast for me as he had done once before, and he did a masterful job. Now, once again, my characters looked like what I saw when I looked in the mirror. King took this as an opportunity to reintroduce the strip as well. So, a new sales kit was put together and a sales relaunch of the strip prepared. This was not something that was usually done for a thirty-five-year-old comic strip.
From the introduction to The Complete Funky Winkerbean Vol. 12
