Mr. Squish’s memorial service.

When I first conceived this brilliant idea where Leonard Squish stayed dead, I figured I’d make it into a regular thing.

The characters in the strip would frequently refer to the recently departed Leonard, much like the Bloom County regulars kept referring to the recently departed Bill the Cat (until they cloned him). The strip would thereafter consist of Randall, Armand, and any other characters I added, and they’d continue the strip without him. And whenever it came up, “So why’s the strip still called ‘Mr. Squish’?” I could point out that I could rename it “Randall”… but there was no guarantee Randall wouldn’t get whacked at the end of the semester.

Nah. The strip would still be “Mr. Squish,” and regularly, to justify the name, they’d refer to the late Mr. Squish.

Yeah, dumb idea.

I scripted about four or five possible ideas, and they all sucked. Plus this constant referral to Dead Leonard just sucked all the funny out of the strip. It was morbid, not amusing. Kinda like the strip above.

Randall’s vengeful little “Gonna Shoot Santa Claus” song made a few folks chuckle. (I was, however, ordered to remove the “goddamn” and replace it with “stupid.”) Beyond that, the fixation on Leonard’s death just wasn’t amusing. Imagine every strip, twice a week, consisting of references to a murdered comic strip character. Doesn’t work.

So the cop-out I came up with was “Mr. Squish: The Early Years.” Which, I admit right now, I stole from the sitcom Sledge Hammer! No, I’m not confessing vigorously; the name Sledge Hammer! has an exclamation point in it. It was an ’80s sitcom about an extremely violent cop whose first name was Sledge; you can easily guess his last name. It was like Dirty Harry on cocaine. In fact, that’s probably how the showrunner came up with the idea. The guy was trigger-happy, talked to his gun—but wasn’t so schizophrenic he didn’t hide this trait—and went the violent route whenever he could get away with it. It’s since been released on DVD, without laugh track—which makes it way, way less funny.

Anyway, end of the first season, there was a cliffhanger where Sledge had to defuse an atomic bomb and failed, resulting in the nuked ruins of Los Angeles, and Hammer’s boss screaming his catchphrase, “Hamm-mmer!” over them. But when the show was picked up for another season, they had no followup… so they ran the same ol’ opening titles with the caption beneath them, “The Early Years.”

Teaching me, at the time, there’s always a way out when you paint yourself into a corner.

It wasn’t entirely a cop-out, as you’ll see from the next couple strips. I didn’t just continue on as if nothing happened. I actually dipped into Leonard’s backstory. Then I tired of that, took a surreal left turn into a comic-book-style resurrection… and I’ll get to that later.

The gratuitously over-violent “Gonna Shoot Santa Claus” song was ’cause I clearly had Sledge Hammer! on the brain when I wrote this strip. Yes, this meant it could never, ever run in a family newspaper. But I never, ever planned for it to.