Introduction Early on Sunday mornings, for a couple years during my North Hollywood boyhood, a pea-green Chevrolet delivery van would screech to a halt in front of our house. The driver would jump out, swing open the doors in the back, grab a bundle of thirty L.A. Herald-Examiners, & toss them at the foot our driveway — then speed away. Actually, it was two bundles, parts of one whole, each bound separately with brown twine — the newspapers themselves & the Sunday Comics sections to wrap around them. The brilliant colors of those broadsheet comics, dazzling even while strapped together, brightened the demeanor of everything in their immediate vicinity, especially me, exciting the creative spirit of this sleepy-eyed boy as he ran across the front yard to retrieve them. It took me two trips to haul in the weekly supply. Then, before doing anything else, before cutting the twine, before counting the papers in each pile & collating them for delivery on my paper route — even before my morning usual of crunchy peanut butter with banana on toast — my nine-year-old self would slip one of the comic sections from its stack, spread it on the livingroom carpet, & begin to read. For me, nothing in life could match the thrill of my first look at Prince Valiant each week on the Comics’ front page. And a full page at that! Six to ten bold panels, the top one always a broad and highly detailed panorama — usually featuring the likes of Viking longboats and their intimidating crews coursing over the tumultuous, fiordic seas; or a heavy stone bridge under violent attack, spears and swords flailing; or maybe the shadowy interior of a Dark Ages castle, with a band of noble knights, bearing ominous expressions, surrounding a torch-lit princess and her hand maidens while they pondered the Fates. Of course, there was also Red Ryder, as well as Terry & the Pirates, Dick Tracy, &, for sure, Pogo — all of which I enjoyed enormously. But, Prince Valiant ruled the funny pages for me. Looking back now on my boyhood Sunday Comics ritual, it’s clear that the sum of ways those funnies seized my focus and triggered my imagination is what, at this precise moment in time, brings you, dear reader, & me together, as this book’s cartoony pages unfold before us. Yep — it was the weekly sparks generated by those glorious days of full-size Sunday Comics that ignited a passion for cartooning in me. Then, decades later, was what launched me into a 40-year toonin' career, the results of which this book hopes to illustrate. :))) barry