Vanna

Vanna arrives in the strip - at this point I only had one other character (Zen), and had no intention of having a female character; then I thought I'd better get a lesbian in here. At this point there is nothing to differentiate her from the male characters except that unfortunate bosom. Like Zen she served as Tad's foil, and a chance to bring in some things like pride groups and lesbian bookstores.

Things that bug me: that brick wall in the background because I hadn't yet learned how to manage white space. The blocky shoulders and that the only thing colored in is the stripes on their shirts - I got a funny letter once asking why all the characters were blonde, because it hadn't occurred to me that you needed to shade in their hair. The only things I knew about cartooning at this point were from the back of a Fox Trot collection where the author showed how he did it.

And the joke: meh. I was still playing with the idea that Tad was deeply in the closet; later I would shift this joke to Ben, an obnoxious straight guy who was assigned to the gay dorm as a disciplinary measure. I'm not very subtle with my humor.