I always liked the idea of involving readers in my strip. In early '95, I took that notion to its extreme: asking readers to send in their own fashion drawings with a chance to see their work reproduced in Luann. On Jan.14, 1995, after doing a sequence about an upcoming school fashion show, I put a call for entries in the strip. I had no idea how many - or how few - entries I'd get. I wondered if a fashion design contest would leave all my male readers cold.

About a week later, the drawings started coming in - up to 800 in one day. In the end, about 3,000 people sent drawings - 15,000 drawings in all.

And they were from age 5 to age 97, male and female. I got everything from crayon scrawls on paper towels to full color computer renderings. I got whole classrooms that sent drawings. I got photos of people wearing fashions they'd created and made. I even got patterns so I could make them myself. I got many drawings that were elegant, some that were bizarre, several that were funny and a few that were, well, unprintable.

Then, with terrific support from my syndicate, we did something that had never been done before: I produced 4 different versions of the week's worth of reader drawings so they could be "zoned" to where the reader lived. Thus, people in the Northeast saw strips featuring drawings by people in their area. People in the Southwest saw their drawings, etc. By doing this, we were able to show 4 times as many drawings. We also notified the local papers and, in several cases, they did articles on their hometown fashion designer.