I killed off Leonard Squish in fall 1990, and I meant it. He was honest-to-goodness, no-fooling-around, dead.
Okay, some fooling around.
If you’re familiar with the term “comic book death,” you know when comic books kill someone, they never stay dead. They can always be brought back. Even when bringing ’em back would seriously mess up the storyline. Fr'instance Bruce Wayne’s parents, whose murder caused him to become Batman. If one of the Batman writers decided it’d be awesome to bring ’em back to life, via magic or some convoluted retcon or zombie science or Black Lantern power rings, they’ll be back before you can cry, Zatanna-style, “Srehtaefesroh!” Anyone can be brought back, and nearly everyone has. If you know of any exceptions, give it time. They’ll be back eventually.
I first experienced this in the old Batman comic books. In 1964, they killed Alfred. No, seriously, they killed Alfred. Alfred. The one indispensable guy Batman has. Kill all the Robins you want, but you don’t kill Alfred. Anyway, he was dead, but two years later (just in time for the TV show) they brought him back. Turns out he’d been mostly dead, but not dead dead, and some butterfly hunter who happened to dabble in cryogenics had found Alfred’s mostly-dead body and brought him back to life. Only evil. But eventually it was all sorted out, ’cause that’s how comic books do.
There was some viral internet video I watched back in 2012 which claimed the comic book death began with Superman, when they killed him in 1992, and brought him back soon thereafter. Don’t you believe it. The trope’s been around forever. Supergirl and the Flash were both killed in 1985, and both of them were brought back fairly quickly. The second Robin was killed in 1988; there’ve been three Robins since, but they brought that guy back in 2005. They just killed Spider-Man, and brought him back, last year. Nobody stays dead. Not when there are new stories to make of them.
But at the time I killed off Leonard, I decided I wasn’t doing any comic book death. I had every intention of continuing the strip with him dead. I wanted to make that crystal clear in the first strip in Spring 1991: Leonard was really really really dead, really most sincerely dead. So there.
You might notice I used slightly different fonts in the strip. That’s ’cause I was working off a different computer. I was no longer the Hornet’s Graphics Coordinator. (I didn’t go into journalism to become a graphic designer anyway.) That semester, I took a lateral step to become the Arts and Features Editor. I considered it a step up, but my stipend didn’t reflect this: Doing graphics got me $300 a month, but A&F got me $150. Even though it was five times the work. Yeah, it seems nuts, but it’s basic supply and demand: Features writers are a dime a dozen, but good luck finding decent graphic artists. It’s why I made better money in graphic design than I ever did writing.
The new job meant I no longer had the Macintosh SE-30, with the 512K of RAM, the 250MB hard drive, and all the fancy fonts. Nope; now I had a regular Macintosh SE. (Yes kids, this was the dark ages. Your cell phone can do more than both those computers combined.) I could bellyache about the technology, but there’s no point: We still managed to crank out two editions of the Hornet every week, on a combination of those ancient Macs and a team of green-monitor Sanyo PCs which we only used for word processing. (Which we called “IBM clones” back then, ’cause every computer which ran the Microsoft Disk Operating System did so as a result of duplicating IBM’s hardware.) Safe to say I’m far happier with today’s technology, even though it is killing off print media, and rendering a big chunk of my journalism degree and State Hornet experience obsolete.
But back to 1991. My new responsibilities were to supervise, edit, and lay out an eight-page section twice a week. I didn’t need an assistant for my previous position, but now I definitely did. I got my friend Warren Nicht to do it. He was great, and freed me up enough so I could write a few articles and keep drawing Mr. Squish. Despite the workload, the A&F job was the most fun I’d had at the Hornet, and definitely the biggest learning experience. It all went downhill from there. (Not bad or disastrous; just downhill. C’est la vie.)
As for Leonard, well, where can we go from “The strip can’t go on”? Tell ya next week.