So, for the moment, a crisis had been averted. I was quickly assured that no one would be changing anything in my work (except for fixing the spelling on bananas) without consulting me first, and they were as good as their word. But the incident had exposed a vulnerability that concerned me. My contract had been a burr under my saddle from the very beginning, but this was the first time I had really felt the pinch. The people I was working with were content to leave me alone for the moment, but what if something crazy happened like, say, Rupert Murdoch buying my syndicate? (Oh, wait . . . Rupert Murdoch did end up buying my syndicate. Hmmm . . . So maybe I wasn’t so paranoid after all.) Plus, there was one other thing that would make my spider-sense tingle every now and then, and paying heed to it might not sit too well with the folks at my syndicate. It was something the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had written when he was announcing that they were replacing Little Orphan Annie with Funky. It was one of the reasons he gave for dropping Annie. He said that “the trouble was that Annie never grew up . . .”
From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume Three
