Newspaper comics were essential to my upbringing; all the better when collected in flimsy paperbacks and anthologies to permit binge reading as opposed to daily patience. My mom had a stack of 15¢ Peanuts books that I pored over again and again and again. When I was eight or nine I collated every instance I could find of Snoopy's "It was a dark and stormy night" novel and typed it all up on our primitive word processor. I like to think that was one of the first signs of my being a scholar at heart.

In time other favorites rolled in: Sylvia, Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, FoxTrot, and Zits, with a sideline into Tintin. My mom, brother, and I read them over and over like the faithful examining oracular utterances, and countless phrases from comics became the literary matrix of our family life. I pushed the cartoons in my son's direction as soon as he could read, with the happy result that comic intertextuality now spans three generations.

People who read comics sooner or later try making their own. I've always liked to draw, but I've liked words still better, or maybe I've just never had the patience to stick with drawing till I got good enough at it to do anything other than amuse myself. I am a cactus blossom of a cartoonist: late to bloom and brief of duration. The impetus for this sole foray into cartooning was seminary in all its self-contradictory glory.

So, here are the grand total of 15 cartoons in the strip known as Mistress of Divinity. I managed to colorize only the first half of them, and the very last one is a sketch that never got the full treatment. They were all done round about 2002 and 2003. I hope even now they elicit a giggle or two!