First of all it would read, not say. Come on.

Years ago I was browsing stock imagery and stumbled across one of what appeared to be a family of tennis players. This photo is two kinds of gonzo—it’s so specific and staged and weird, but also nowhere to be found on the internet any longer. Good thing I was inspired enough at the time to make a series of single-panel… comics?… based on the foursome! The man in the blue shirt was everything.

The idea was better than the execution—the first, as usual, was the strongest—and they petered out later than they should have. Ten survive in the archives and six still make me laugh, so I’ll stretch them out over miles of highway through blue-state America.

Wouldn’t you want to keep going after this? It brings me so much joy.

I remember spending a lot of time getting the Ms, Fs and Ts just right.

A. insisted on censorship and Public Enemy still got the most likes on Facebook. I tried to recapture the magic with quotes from Jaws and Trading Places but they just didn’t work. Sell! Sell!

This “thread” on imagined intra-family dynamics died out when the daughter’s plot to murder her mother with a tennis racquet “and make it look like an accident” pushed father—my muse—to the sidelines. Drag.

I like my man’s petulance. Not much of a joke but I’ll take it.