Happy Tax Day!
Original art from First Kiss #21, 1961,
Don’t be petty, Helen. Let me talk to Ted.
Look, just because I slept with him last night doesn’t mean you can’t trust me now.
Well, all right. I guess I can wait for him to finish making love to you. But tell him to hurry!
Someone in my family supposedly predicted that both of my marriages would fail within six months. (For the sake of family harmony, I’ll call her “Grand Aunt Gloompuss.”)
Given my family’s history this seemed like a pretty safe bet.
There are an unusual number of divorces in my family: My parents. Both sets of grandparents and at least one set of great grandparents.
So the odds were stacked against me. However…
My first marriage lasted nearly 10 years and would still be going strong if I hadn’t been widowed.
My second marriage is closing in on 30 years now. And that’s considerably longer than any of Grand Aunt Gloompuss’s three marriages.
I don’t have a reliable credit for the original art, but it’s likely that it was done by the Vince Colletta Studio. Allen Freeman extended the art for me when he colored it. The original appeared in First Kiss #10, 1959.
This is one of several gags that I’ve done for the anthology “Anything That Loves.”
The book has some incredibly talented creators (Ellen Forney, Erika Moen, Kevin Boze, Roberta Gregory, Roberta Gregory, Stasia Kato, and more) in the lineup.
And the topic? Well, to quote from the Kickstarter campaign: A bold new comics anthology that explores and celebrates the complex world beyond the categories of “gay” and “straight”.
I normally don’t talk about my sexuality, but here goes. (Prepare to be shocked.)
I’m straight.
Yeah, I know what you were thinking. But that’s sort of the point. Most of the time we make assumptions about people’s sexual orientation, but we don’t really know.
Some people don’t fit into our assumptions. And that’s one of things this book explores.
Original art from First Kiss #2, 1958. Click to enlarge.
The great thing about my Last Kiss characters is that they’re all so tactful—just like me.
It’s like I was telling one of my girlfriends…uh, I mean my wife, “If you can’t say something nice, shut the **** up!”
See? What could be more tactful than that?
This is a scan of the original art from Thrilling Romances #20 (1952.)
