Match to Flame 225

Second, I had built churches cathedrals on top of a lot of running themes and tropes that had served me very well but that I now continued to tear down and leave behind. For example, losing had always been a tried-and-true theme in Funky. Readers identified with characters who gave it their best but who always fell just a little short (or fell really hard as when Lucy pulled away the football from Charlie Brown). Raised on Charles Schulz’s incomparable masterpiece Peanuts, lovable losers had been my factory setting when I began my own cartooning career. Now, however, I wanted to flip the coin and see what was on the other side. So, Ann Fairgood returns to the stage as an assistant girls’ basketball coach and helps to coach the team to the state finals, and Les’s book about Lisa gets optioned by Hollywood for a movie—both things I wouldn’t have done forty years earlier. Other stories included Wally Winkerbean getting a service dog to help him deal with his PTSD (the ongoing story would be informed, of course, by the aforementioned great room incident. I waste nothing.), Les and Cayla getting married, Crazy Harry getting riffed by the post office, and Darin and Jess having a baby, a piece that was written sitting by a bay window in a coffee shop in Chapel Hill while waiting for my bus ride.

In an artwork aside, which I’m intrusively inserting here since I don’t know where else to put it, as I was going through the strips in this volume I came across a week that I had done on the computer in Manga Workshop. It was a beautiful program that allowed me to vary the line quality just as I would inking with the pens I was using. The result wasn’t bad, but it just didn’t feel right to me. The good thing was that I knew I could do my inking totally on the computer should I ever drop into what was left of my local art store to find the shelves empty where the paper used to be. In the meantime, it was back to the drawing board and not in the metaphorical sense. I gave my board a big hug and settled back in for the rest of the ride.