May 5, 2003
I published this strip on my grandmother’s birthday. She rarely ever talked about her childhood, and I found this story particularly moving and personal.
This strip is also the first instance of my “flashback style,” which uses stick figures whenever someone is telling a story about themselves that I wasn’t around to experience first-hand. Funny enough, it wasn’t really a conscious decision to make it a different style. It was more like, I don’t know what my grandma or her one-room school house looked like, so I used a more abstract style that let me fudge the details. And it stuck, cuz I ended up using the stick-figure flashbacks pretty regularly as the strip went on!