Of the 5,500 or so strips I've written, this one was the hardest. I wrote and rewrote this strip, trying to figure out how to have Luann reveal her new womanhood to Bernice. Finally, the simple solution hit me: use a punctuation mark.


Here again, I had to be obtuse. I'm amazed and frustrated that no other form of entertainment is bound by the restrictions that shackle comic strips. TV, movies, magazines, comic books - even other sections of the newspaper itself (like Ann Landers, often on the same page as the comics) - have more latitude in the subjects they can deal with and the language they can use than comic strips do. I don't get it.

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