The End of Living on the Fault Line...
By 1990, my wife and I were raising 2 kids, and the expense of living in Marin County caught up with me. The Coastal Post was also going through changes, as it became harder for newspapers to compete with this newfangled pestilence mysteriously referred to as “the Internet.” I tried to modernize Bobo Briones, too, by giving him a “new look” and a family — ostensibly after he had grown out of his carefree hippie lifestyle, and had to take on the responsibilities of modern life. It wasn’t too hard to see the similarities…
September 1990 - February 1991
Eventually, the strains of domestic life became too much for Bobo. He lost his high-paying job, and wound up working in a Pet Store. This was another parallel to my life, because I’d been working in pet stores for about 10 years at the time. He wound up having lots of car problems, which I don’t really want to talk about, since I am known by mechanics as “the car virus.”
March - June 1991
…Then it was time for him to revert to his former, hippie self, as a final tribute to the daily format of the long-running comic strip.
By 1991, the Coastal Post finally had to switch from a weekly to a monthly newspaper. Advertising revenues were dwindling, as well as the attention span of the average reader, who now spent most of their time online, waiting for modem-powered web pages to load. I really needed extra income, as an observant reader may be able to deduce from the corny adverts included in my comic strips. After a brief hiatus studying to become a medical assistant, I took the opportunity to expand the strip’s format to a “Sunday Double” size, which gave me more room to draw.
1992 - 1994
Bobo was resurrected several years later, to expand his wanderings not only outside of Marin County, but to include the entire United States. My family took a trip across the county and back, for one whole summer, in a V.W. bus. We hit most of the national parks and monuments along the way, and collected gas station stickers in 23 states! I could have drawn about my older sister, who sat on the toilet the whole time… but that cartoon idea stinks. So I changed the characters around, with Bobo becoming “Clark” in…
Lois & Clark - 1998
Fault Line Leftovers
These were published in the Coastal Post, too.
