Match to Flame – 53

Aug 23, 2017

On the home front, Cathy and I were busy doing all the things that a new home requires. I was still in my Mother Earth period. Each spring we’d put in a big garden and harvest a cornucopia of produce in the fall, so it was only natural that gardening would show up in the strip as well. We even found time to go on a real bona fide vacation when in the fall of 1978 we took a trip to Cape Cod. It was the first vacation that wasn’t tied to my having to make an appearance somewhere, but, even there, thoughts didn’t stray too far from the strip. I was a runner and had always wanted to run in the Boston Marathon. I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a bucket list thing since I had wanted to do it since high school. I also wouldn’t say that I was a good runner, but, back in the day, you could run at Boston simply by showing up. Showing up I could do. Later it became necessary to qualify, and that, along with Father Time, would eventually put the final kibosh on my marathon ambitions. But the beauty of doing a comic strip is that you can rectify that sort of thing, so while we were on the East Coast we went up to Boston and drove the Boston Marathon course backwards from Copley Square to Hopkington, taking reference pictures the whole way so Fred Fairgood, Funky’s school counselor, could make the run in the strip. With the arrival of our son Brian, we finally got to experience the parental side of the family dynamic, but it would still be a few years before any parents would show up in the strip on an ongoing basis.

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean V0l. Three

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