Maxine! The Early Years...

It still surprises me that I am a cartoonist.  Really, you could knock me over with a feather.  As a small child, despite various fantasies of growing up to be an opera singer, a mad scientist, a secret agent, or a Persian cat, I always assumed that I'd be a painter.  This notion was encouraged, mercilessly, by my beloved art teacher at Chatham Hall (a girls' boarding school in Virginia, where Georgia O'Keeffe was also a student and art teacher, albeit a bit before my time). 

So imagine my surprise when - after four years of further fine arts training at Scripps College in California - my paintings were invaded by these two wildly dressed and immodestly behaved vixens.  I had never painted anything like them in my life.  I had never seen anything like them in my life. Those grins! That ponytail! Those long, grasping fingers!  My art teachers would've been appalled.  I was terribly pleased.  Over the next year and a half, these wild and crazy gals evolved into Maxine and her pal Simone as we know them.  In October 1981, "Maxine!" debuted in the Dallas Observer.

The Little Bald Headed Girl materialized on my drawing board in 1985.   She wanted me to make color comics of all my weirdest dreams; she wanted to star in them.  I didn't argue.