Author Archives: Shannon Menu

Saturday March 6, 2021

Lynn's Comments: I was hoping the item on the wire looked like a jock strap! When newspapers reduced the size of the comics page, we had much less space in which to make a gag work. Every square centimeter had to count and small details had to be drawn with real care so that they were evident to the reader. I hoped that I'd had enough space in the last panel to include the characters (for expression), the dialogue and the gag. Maybe not!

Friday March 5, 2021

Lynn's Comments: Looking back on this strip, I had a hard time figuring out what Elizabeth was doing in the first panel here. She is stuffing her clothes into the washing machine. When I work with students, I always tell them to make sure the audience knows what they are looking at, that they use good reference so that appliances and machinery look right. Here, it seems, I didn't follow my own advice!

Saturday February 27, 2021

Lynn's Comments: This strip is very close to the bone for me. My mother would have been called an abusive parent by today's standards. She was physically and emotionally abusive, but she just didn't know how to parent. When she found a drawing I had done of her as a witch holding a whip, she cried.

Wednesday February 17, 2021

Lynn's Comments: Following this revelation, I received many letters. Readers were not as interested in asking me about the life of the character in the strip but in telling me about their own abusive experiences. Stories like this brought me, personally, closer to my readers than I had ever been before.

Friday February 12, 2021

Lynn's Comments: The way to write a story, using one statement a day, is to include valuable information in dialogue that is crafted as a joke. Here, we get the joke about the hat, but it's connected to Gordon's gloves. He needn't have left his gloves at the Patterson house, but by having this happen, I was both confirming that Elly had intervened and that Gordon liked being in the Patterson home. This works as ongoing information without having to delve into the difficult storyline again.

Tuesday February 9, 2021

Lynn's Comments: This strip left readers wondering and imagining what was happening behind those closed doors. Not showing anything more was a good thing—it kept the strip from becoming too negative, and it gave readers the opportunity to think about what goes on in their own neighbourhoods. You can suspect something is happening, but you might never know for sure.