Match to Flame 228

The second “big story” happened in the fall of 2012, and it took my Holy Grail thread to a new place. I had been using the old comic book covers in my Sunday strips to give a nod to the comic book artists I had admired as a youth, and that particular string was pretty much played out. In my writing at Chapel Hill, however, I had written an ongoing story that involved Holly Winkerbean searching for old comic books to complete her son Cory’s comic book collection while he was away in the service. I was going to need quite a few comic book covers featuring only one character, and I thought it would be pushing things a bit to continue to use real comic books for something like that. My use of the old covers had always been fair use, but I wasn’t anxious to possibly have to prove that in court. The solution lay amongst the slew of comic strip characters that I had created back when I was in the fifth grade, and on one character in particular—Starbuck Jones. Starbuck was a space opera, blood and thunder–picaresque hero whose exploits I recounted in primitive but heartfelt cartoons of my own at the time. I decided that he would be perfect for what I had in mind. I would also take the name of my youthful comic book company, Batom Comics, for the new cover. The next question became who would create the covers. Chuck Ayers was penciling Funky at the time, and he was not a fan of science fiction or comic books. He would have done a very good serviceable job, but he wasn’t that familiar with comic books or common comic book tropes. I wanted these new faux covers to look like actual comic book covers. No, this needed to be more of an inside job. And then the cartoon lightbulb over my head lit up. The very first comic book cover homage that I used featuring Superman and Supergirl had been drawn for me to ink by Supergirl artist Jim Mooney, a comic book pro from my youth. So I thought, why not see if I could commission some of the other comic book artists whose work I admired to create the covers that I would need for this story arc?

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 14