Notes: My first attempt at political humor. The weird thing is, when I show it to my friends who are still in (or just out) of college, they think it is still very timely. I'm not sure if that means that all I wrote was a good gag .... or if I struck upon a cultural truth.

When I look at these first few strips I can very clearly see the influence of Berke Breathed's comic Bloom County on my use of shading and background. I'd all ready developed an artistic shorthand for faces and physical motion, but the difficulty of giving depth and texture to a world shown only in 2.5"x3" squares was daunting. I was taken with Breathed's use of shadows marking the corner of a frame (rather than any particular space in a "real" setting). Eventually I realized that unlike when I drew and wrote comic books, I didn't really think of the comic strips as representing a "real world." To me they were little staged comedy sketches ... they didn't have to look any more real than a Saturday Night Live stage set (an attitude I still cling to to this day). This perspective of "comic strip filmed on a sound stage" was probably influenced by Gary Trudeau's work when he took a sabbatical from, and then relaunched, his Doonesbury strip in the mid 1980s (though Breathed also took advantage of that conceit from time to time in Bloom County, and much more frequently in his subsequent work on Outland).