With the flair that anyone who has ever known Julie has come to expect, the youthful entrepreneur from Alabama successfully made the jaded journalists of the Big Apple take note. She was launching a new alternative tabloid called Granny, and did she have a publicity stunt for them!

Granny’s life on the city’s cluttered newsstands was flashy but brief — too brief for all of the Muddlebrow episodes I had at the ready to actually see print. Tucked away amid my batch of orphaned strips was a two-part tale featuring an annoying little girl named Belle who, thanks to an unlikely birth defect, would float helplessly into the sky if not constrained by a string held by some grudgingly dutiful friends. Muddlebrow itself was never revived, but I had trouble turning loose of that particular story-within-a-story.

I decided, roughly a decade thereafter, to see if Belle’s story could be expanded into a satirical picture book. True, its comedy might be a bit black for some sensitive tykes, but that didn’t stop me from thinking that the snarkier branch of America’s youth — the branch that waited breathlessly for each successive issue of Mad magazine — might find my fable amusing. And if the pictures, narration, and dialogue were entertaining enough, some grown-ups might take to it, too.

My enthusiasm was stoked by a cheery book agent from Louisiana who was certain that she would be able to find a suitable publisher for my book. Buoyed by her optimism, I set about creating a newer, bigger fable fueled by the same premise as Muddlebrow’s brief, unpublished version.

In an early draft of the new text, Belle’s name was changed to Phyllis because of the euphony thus lent to my projected book’s title, Phyllis’s Friends. Then I got nervous about gender issues. Were there unconscious overtones of misogyny at play when I chose to hold up a chubby, unlikable female to ridicule? Yikes! (True, the real-life person whose behavior was the model for Felix’s excesses had indeed been both female and chubby, but still…)

To take that touchy issue off the table, Phyllis’s Friends became Felix’s Friends before Phyllis ever got a chance to get drawn. Still euphonious, but less likely to provoke feminist ire.

Below: Belle and Felix. (My title character never made it onto paper during her Phyllis stage.)

At least, magic-working was what I imagined to be happening during the lon-n-n-ng stretch of time that unfolded before I discovered — first from other of her clients and eventually from my own experience — that I had apparently hitched my fortunes to a likable flake who, after many excuses, would cease returning phone calls without offering evidence that my book had actually been viewed by a single editor.

Strung along by an agent wannabe who talked big! Darn! I was no happy camper when I withdrew my book from her custody.

It was a set-back, but Belle’s literary descendant still found a future of sorts several years after the aforementioned fiasco, when I decided to rearrange its pages into a comic-like format for inclusion in Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels, the 1987 St. Martin’s Press collection of my strips and stories that (with a few exceptions, Felix among them) had previously appeared in underground comix and elsewhere.

Below: Felix’s tale reconfigured into a four-pictures-to-a-page, comic-booky version appropiate for a comics collection.

Within a few years the dreaded out-of-print axe fell on Dancin’ Nekkid, thereby ending the public’s access to Felix while Toland Polk was busy agonizing about his sexual identity on my drawing board. Neither the softcover version issued by St. Martin’s Press nor the hardcover, limited-edition twin simultaneously produced by Kitchen Sink Press, have been anywhere near a bookstore shelf since then, and Felix’s Friends has been re-consigned to limbo.

But maybe not forever. I began thinking a short time ago about the tantalizing new options that have arisen within the publishing realm — options that are especially viable when making big money isn’t an author’s prime motivation.

Which brings me to the modest new 64-page trade paperback you see below (a few samples pages of which can be found by visiting my web site’s Felix’s Friends section).

But neither Blue Fairies nor enthusiastic agents have been able to work that magic so far. The "real" publishers at whom I’ve dangled the book in recent years have told me they wouldn’t know how to market it.

But fortunately, these days I can do more than twiddle my thumbs while waiting for Felix’s stars to align. Inexpensive POD (print-on-demand) self-publishing has arrived.

As has my Lulu.com edition of Felix’s Friends. The investment has been trivial (as will be any money made from it, probably), but who cares? Putting out a book just for fun — what a concept!

This is Felix’s tale told in the format I’ve wanted it to have for twenty-five years. Belle and Phyllis would be pleased.

Or not. Taking pleasure in anyone’s enjoyment but their own hasn’t come easily to any of Felix’s successive incarnations.

But I would, on general principles, order comp copies for them from the Lulu Marketplace if my brainchildren existed anywhere outside of my fevered imagination. That being impossible, I’ve ordered one for myself.

Postscript: the New York Granny is not to be confused with Julie’s and my undergraduate project Granny Takes a Trip, about which I’ve blogged before.

Below: The roving camera of Jeremy Clowe, Communications Assistant at the museum, snaps a moment of opening-reception collegiality featuring ComicMix’s Editor-in-chief Mike Gold, Mark Wheatley, Marc Hempel, me, and exhibit curator Martin Mahoney.

Anyway, the museum has sent me their anticipated lineup of activities for next Saturday, so I’ll pass them on here for the benefit of any of you who are likely to be in or near Stockbridge on the 3rd thinking, "Gee, a comic arts festival would really hit the spot right around now."

An exciting day of workshops, lectures, book signings, and conversation with noted comic artists and historians in celebration of LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel. Got mini-comics to swap? Here’s a good place to exchange ‘em.

Refreshments will be served, and lunches will be available for purchase.

10:00AM Welcome to the Norman Rockwell Museum
Curator of Education, Tom Daly, and LitGraphic Curator, Martin Mahoney

 10:30AM Graphic Novels: An Illustrated History
A lively visual history by Robin Brenner, librarian and Eisner Award Juror

 11:30AM Drawing in the Galleries
An On-Site Demonstration with graphic novelist, Lauren Weinstein, whose original illustrations for Girl Stories are on view.

 11:30AM-4:00PM Wet Ink!
Create and Post Your Own Comic Art: A drop in, hands-on workshop with Jack Purcell, comic book artist and educator

12:00PM Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels
Author and library director David Berona will offer an illustrated look at his new book

1:00PM Creating Comics:
A Conversation with Marc Hempel and Mark Wheatley
The two comic creators, whose art for Breathtaker is on view, will discuss their work with comic art collector and historian Warren Bernard.

2:00PM Howard Cruse’s Comics Vault
Artist Howard Cruse will offer personal commentary on his comic art, which currently is on view            

3:00PM Collecting Comics
Personal viewpoints on collecting by Scott Eder, founder of the Scott Eder Gallery and Comic Book Art Dot Com

4:00PM Book Signing
with David Berona, Robin Brenner, Howard Cruse, Marc Hempel, R. Sikoryak, Mark Wheatley, and Lauren Weinstein

4:30PM-5:30PM Carousel and Wet Ink Reception
A series of comic slide shows by artists, with illustrator and cartoonist, R. Sikoryak, and graphic novelist Lauren Weinstein. Join us for refreshments!

Plus the All-Day Mini Comic Exchange
Share your art with fellow artists and comics aficionados. Tables will be available for your use.

Festival admission is free with regular Museum admission. Children 18 and under are free. Please be advised that graphic novels sometimes address adult subject matter. Parental discretion is advised.

For more information call 413-298-4100 ext 260

I was briefly a grad student at Penn State University forty years ago. My stay at PSU in the fall of 1968 was funded by a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship, and a couple of my short plays (one of which can be found on this very web site) even made it onstage as part of the theatre department’s Five O’clock Theatre student workshop series.

Personal issues quickly derailed my attempt to be a Very Good Fellow that fall, unfortunately, and I fled to New York over the Christmas holidays before making much of a dent in my Shubert money.

Despite the inauspiciousness of my grad school career, though, I had a mostly good time at Penn State during my brief stay, the odd depression and panic attack aside. I forged several enduring friendships, helped paint the set for a main stage production of O’Neill’s Ah Wilderness, and even made good grades somehow in the courses I took.

So despite the fact that so much time has passed since then that not a single inch of the campus I encountered looked remotely familiar, I nevertheless felt a definite twinge of nostalgia when I returned to PSU last weekend at the invitation of Eileen Akin, coordinator of PSU Special Collections Library’s Audio-Visual Collections and Fred Waring archives, who asked me to give a talk as part of the Graphic Novel Speakers Series she spearheads.

Below: Eileen and I commune with cartooning greats in the Waring collection’s Cartoon Room

An honorary member of the National Cartoonists Society and the host of annual NCS golfing retreats at his Shawnee-on-the-Delaware home base, Waring was the regular recipient of thank-you art from his legion of grateful ‘tooner friends.

Hence the "Cartoon Room" at Penn State, because of which the PSU library’s Waring archive is as notable for its walls full of framed cartoon originals that almost nobody has ever seen as for its long shelves of Waring choral arrangements and displays of fascinating memorabilia from the decades during which Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians graced music-lovers with their unforgettable performances and broadcasts.

Below: Just one of the reasons why Eileen Akin’s lair at PSU is a feast for any cartoon-lover’s eyes.

You can bet that we’ll be carrying the Hillary banner proudly in the general election, though, if she ends up copping the nomination. She’s not short on confidence-inspiring qualities (particularly when she lets her better angels carry the day). And we urge present-day Hillary folks to similarly work their butts off to elect Barack if his campaign for the nomination carries the day. Let’s don’t let the White House remain in the hands of the party that’s spent eight long years inflicting more damage on the U.S. than would have seemed humanly possible — even given the track records left by Reagan and Bush the dad.

Between Clinton and Obama, we think Omama offers more than his opponent does of what America needs in a leader today. So Eddie has packed his bags and headed to the Pennsylvania hills to act on his beliefs.

He does that kind of thing. It’s one of the attributes that made me fall for him 29 years ago.

On Valentine’s Day I made a return visit to White River Junction, VT, at the invitation of that city’s new creative crown jewel, the Center for Cartoon Studies.

CCS, which was conceived, founded, and is now overseen by graphic novelist James Sturm, offers a two-year course of study for aspiring comics creators ready to settle in Vermont and get serious about honing their craft under the tutelage of cartooning professionals like Jason Lutes, James Kochalka, Stephen R. Bissette, and others.

This was my second time to swap thoughts about comics with a batch of Steve Bissette’s students. Steve and I go back a ways, of course, having swapped war stories about the comics industry in various settings over the decades. Like hosts of comics fans, I had admired his talents from afar well before we found ourselves conversing face-to-face at assorted events where cartoonists congregate. Steve helped raise my profile beyond underground and gay circles by interviewing me, along with his co-author Stanley Wiater, for their 1992 book Comic Book Rebels, and when Eddie and I first moved to the Berkshires Steve was quick to invite me up to White River Junction to speak to the students in the CCS class he was teaching at that time. I enjoyed myself back then and had a similarly entertaining time this year.

Steve amazes me. In his alternate identity as a blogger, he puts me totally to shame. Where does he get the energy? Where does he find the time? It’s been two weeks since I visited CCS and only now am I managing to get my act together to compose a few paragraphs marking my trip. It’s a good thing it’s not up to me to funnel "breaking news" to CNN!

I learned recently that Steve and I both spent time during the 1980s collaborating with one "Jovial Bob Stine," the man who edited and largely wrote Scholastic’s Bananas magazine before mutating into R. L. Stine, the fabulously (and deservedly) successful author of the Goosebumps juvenile horror novels.

The fact that the curriculum was simply conveying demonstrable facts about the demonstrably diverse makeup of New York’s community life carried no weight with this determined lady, who ultimately succeeded in have the curriculum in question quashed.

Last week I came across my sketched version of "The Educator,"my comic strip response to this controversy. It never found a home and hence was never re-drawn in finished form, but I still kind of like it.

First graders used to learn to read by reading books starring two bland suburban kids named Dick and Jane.

There were presumably no homosexuals living on Dick and Jane’s block, although Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat could occasionally be spotted lurking near their playground, awaiting his moment.

Sure, those of us with Mac computers could feel smug in the knowledge that the bug in question would only begin making Microsoft’s PCs go haywire at the stroke of midnight, not our superiorly crafted Apple devices.

Unfortunately, the real world runs mostly on PCs, not Macs, and if the entire set of electric grids that powered Planet Earth were going to go successively ka-flooey time zone by time zone, the refrigerator spoilage of Mac-owners would be just as distasteful as it would for PC-owners.

Lots of computer-patches were being downloaded and installed furiously as the doomsday date approached, but even though the professional geeks who were programming such patches theoretically knew what they were doing, who could be sure that they would get every single thing corrected that needed correcting? After all, if they were so smart, howcum they let the damned bug get into all those computer hard drives in the first place?

So most of us watched television warily on the 31st as midnight began creeping across the world’s land masses. Of course, all eyes (or rather, hungry banks of television cameras) are on the International Dateline every New Year’s Eve, but as the Year 2000 approached the coverage had a different vibe. Normally the planet’s media watch eagerly to the skies over New Zealand brighten dramatically from the first of many displays of crowd-pleasing fireworks that would soon be exploding over the world’s celebrating cities. But in 2000 ther media waiting to see if New Zealand’s lights would all go out and airplanes would begin falling willy-nilly out of those aforementioned skies.

Had such nightmarish developments actually begun unfolding in New Zealand as some had predicted, then those of us located west of there would have various numbers of hours available to contemplate the similar nightmares likely to befall our own time zones as the Sun advanced our way.

It turned out that as clocks struck midnight in one zone after another, catastrophes proved pallid. Some ATMs malfunctioned here and there and other modest inconveniences arose during the next few days, but all in all the Y2K bug proved to be as non-formidable as had the Comet Kahoutek, which also caused widespread edginess as it approached our planet in 1974 and which also failed to live up to its advance billing as a disaster delivery system.

Why is the Y2K Bug on my mind today? Because I happened to come across two rough sketches this week (see above and below) while looking for an unrelated item in my files. These two variations on a theme were commissioned in 1999 by a friend of mine who thought that — what with the end of civilization being imminent — there might be money to be gleaned from making comical Y2K tee-shirts available to consumers.

My friend was naive about the amount of lead-time required for such a merchandizing venture to be profitable, unfortunately. Besides the normal need to lay careful marketing groundwork well in advance of introducing a topical product, it goes without saying that tee-shirts linked to the end of civlization are best sold before civilization actually begins ending, since people senses of humor tend to do downhill fast once their future prospects have been obliterated.

Anyway, neither my friend’s tee-shirts nor finished versions of my two sketches ever materialized. But since the sketches have spent several years in a file drawer waiting to be re-discovered already, why shouldn’t I share them with you today?

I managed to put together Cruse Art Newsletter on time this week. Here’s me patting myself on the back for that.

Meanwhile Eddie and I are bracing ourselves for chaos as architectural plans are finalized for a home renovation project that’s going to turn our home life upside-down very soon.

See the room in the two photos below? That somewhat disorderly and yet homey living room containing a pleasant little old lady (that would be Evelyn, Eddie’s mom) and a serenely distracted dog (that would be Lulu the dalmatian) in full relaxation mode? Memorize what you see, because very soon this room in its present configuration will be history. Gone! Replaced!

Walls throughout our house will be ripped down; our entire configuration of rooms will be rearranged. Life in the Cruse-Sedarbaum dwelling will never be the same.

Last week I wrote about my recording session for an adaptation that may or may not ever happen of The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth. Now I want to belatedly take note of the passing last April of the woman from whose imagination the book’s title character sprang.

I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that I didn’t post anything about Jeanne Shaffer’s death at the time I learned about it. I’m terrible at composing quickie obits when friends depart, and in the case of Doc Shaffer, her achievements merit better-rounded tributes that I can provide by folks who knew her better than I ever did.

Jeanne and I may have produced a book together, but our actual face-to-face visits were limited to maybe half-a-dozen. The visits we did have were sprinkled across a span of decades, the first of them occurring while I was an undergraduate drama-speech major at Birmingham-Southern College forty years ago.

1967, specifically. Jeanne, a composer and educator whose professional home base was at Huntington College in nearby Montgomery, envisioned an opera based on an allegory she had dreamed up about a swimmer who undertakes the rescue of an entire population of miserable people. Itching to start coming up with music for it, Jeanne was scouting for a librettist she could team up with.

Someone who knew that I was an aspiring playwright told her I might be interested in having a go at it. Ignoring the fact that I was a 23-year-old greenhorn, she chased me down and pitched the project.

I loved Jeanne’s story and spent a few months trying to nail down a proper approach. But although she was unfailingly encouraging throughout that period, I soon realized that I was in over my head. Just because I had written a few student plays and had listened to every musical comedy cast album in the Birmingham Public Library record collection didn’t automatically confer mastery of the opera libretto form. Chastened by my clear inadequacy, I begged off, and Jeanne graciously freed me from my commitment.

That could have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Fifteen years later I popped back into Jeanne Shaffer’s life full of excitement about an entirely different way to tell her story. Our heroic swimmer, I told her, could be the protagonist not of an opera but of a comic book story. A story told with silhouettes.

(Why silhouettes? Maybe I’ll get into that another time; this blog entry is about Jeanne Shaffer.)

Now some practitioners of the "fine arts" (and Jeanne’s many musical compositions certainly placed her within those circles) might have looked down their noses at the comics form had they been approached with such an impertinent suggestion. But Jeanne had an adventurous streak and was unburdened by artistic snobbery. She was instantly intrigued by the radical recasting of her idea that I was proposing. Soon she was a certified enthusiast, and her enthusiasm persisted through the more than twenty additional years it took me to complete my adaptation, which mutated early on from a comic book story into a stand-alone book.

If Jeanne had been a more controlling storyteller she might have kept me on a tighter leash as I added my own touches to her fable and revved up its level of satire. But she rolled with the punches, paying me the compliment of trusting me to pretty much have my way with her tale.

Our only creative disagreement during Swimmer’s germination was resolved almost as soon as it appeared. Between the time of her story’s first telling in 1967 and my re-entry into her life in the mid-’80s, Jeanne’s natural generosity of spirit had led her to attach a slightly more hopeful conclusion to her story. I urged her to reconsider. I wanted to confront readers uncompromisingly with her tale’s darker implications and make them deal with it. Our title character may have been propelled by merciful impulses, I acknowledged, but the book itself needed to be merciless.

Mercilessness doesn’t come easily to gracious southern women, but Jeanne saw my point and let me restore her fable’s original ending.

You’d think that our decades-long marathon of creative cooperation and mutual appreciation would have left me more familiar with all aspects of Jeanne Shaffer’s life and personality than it did. Fact is: the ins and outs of Swimmer dominated most of our conversations, whether in person or on the phone. Anything else I’ve learned about her very interesting life history has been absorbed in chance fragments and on the fly.

I did learn that she was a former child actress in the movies. How cool is that? (As "Jeanne Ellis" she played Jeanette MacDonald’s childhood self in Girl of the Golden West.) She toured for five years with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra beginning when she was eleven — an unusual entry to find in the résumé of a cultured Montgomery Episcopalian, I would say — and I learned just now from her entry in the online listing Classical Composers that she sang with Grace Moore on the Lux Radio Theater. (Hey, my brother and I used to lie awake at night listening to the Lux Radio Theater in Springville during the ’50s. I gather we were twenty years too late to catch one of Jeanne’s performances, unfortunately.)

Jeanne enjoyed a 35-year career as an educator and for thirteen years headed the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Huntington. And long after her Lux days she became a radio personality again via the Southeastern Public Radio Network, hosting a weekly program on women’s music called Eine Kleine Frauenmusik.

Years ago I asked Jeanne if recordings of her music existed and she directed me to a CD of organ performances by Frances Norbert called Music She Wrote: Organ compositions by Women , which includes selections composed by Jeanne along with the work of others (most of it downloadable from the link above). I’m listening to her contributions to that CD as I write this.

I gather that late in her career Jeanne must have played an important cheerleading role for female composers through her web site WomensMusic.com — a site that Google apparently thinks is still alive but that I’ve had no luck accessing this week, which makes me think it did not survive its founder. (If you have better luck than I did, let me know.)

It doesn’t surprise me that teaching, mentoring, and helping other creative people was a strain that ran through the long, productive life that Jeanne led, since even though I personally experienced only a small sampling of her many facets, being giving was the tack she reflexively took with me. Who was I, anyway? An openly gay cartoonist who had gained his chops in underground comix whom she had previously experienced only as a green college-age playwriting wannabe who couldn’t get his act together, materializing out of nowhere after a decade-and-a-half of non-contact to announce that Hey, you oughta be in comics!

"OK," she said. "Put me in comics."

She continued her pattern of givingness by allowing me a huge degree of creative latitude as I expanded and reshaped her story into something very different in its details from the one she first imagined, but one that still had the same concerns about human folly that she had originally invested it with. At least I hope it did. Jeanne never hinted that it didn’t.

The Swimmer lady is gone now, and I’ll never get a chance to ask her what Jeanette MacDonald was really like. But we came away from our three decades of glancing interactions with a book to show for it that has both of our names on the cover.

How cool is that?!