The package of supporting materials was intended to go out with the strip’s release sheets. When I received my copy of the release sheets in the mail, I eagerly looked for the backing material and found—nothing. All that was in the envelope were the strips, nothing else. In a panic, I called the syndicate and found out that someone in shipping had accidentally forgotten to include the attendant material, which meant that the strips would show up at newspapers across the country unannounced and naked, and long before we could get the buttressing information to them. That’s when two wonderful women in the promotion department, Patti Minassian and Cathy Irvine, stepped up and made lemonade. Since there was no way to get the supporting material to editors in time, they called each and every one of Funky’s editors personally to discuss the series and how they could use the strips along with the soon-to-be-arriving sidebar material as a catalyst to draw attention to the issue of teen pregnancy. The editors were impressed with the personal attention, pleased to be included as partners in the enterprise. Like I said, it worked. The response to those four short seminal weeks was greater than any I had received up to that point. There were so many requests for copies of that series that we put together a special booklet collecting the strips, Life’s Lessons Aren’t Always Learned in the Classroom, and sent out more than sixty thousand copies. When the requests continued to come in, we had to go back for a second printing.
From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume Five
