Nine months of Betty Blonde

Kelly makes all the final editorial decisions about the Betty Blonde comic strip, but she is amazingly collegial about it.  She gets lots of input from Christian on artwork, gag and storyline ideas, narrative, character development, and just about everything else to do with the strip.  She tries to be as gracious as possible in letting me down when we have an idea for a strip that is not up to snuff.

“That is a great idea Dad.  Maybe I can work that in some time, but I think that will break the narrative if I do it right now.”

I know exactly what that means, but I keep trying because it is cool when she uses one of my ideas.  Still, I get to participate pretty heavily in the strip by maintaining the website and mailing list, erasing and scanning the drawings into the computer, acting as the enforcer to remind Kelly there is a deadline, etc.

As we finish the school year and get ready for the summer, we have some pretty big plans for the one year anniversary of Betty Blonde.  We want to add one or two strips per week.  We do not know yet whether the workload will be too heavy to draw Saturday and Sunday strips during the school year next year, but we are going to try it out during the summer.  The plan is for Christian to draw one of the weekly strips as a serial.  Kelly will add a Sunday style color strip each week.  We want to accumulate our first year of strips into a book.  We want to do a t-shirt or mug giveaway.  This all should start ramping up in June of the one year anniversary in mid-July.