March 4, 2010
I was filing some artwork in my art morgue (where terminal art goes to die) and I ran across a comic strip that ran in the New Times in the seventies. My high school life was still quite raw in my mind and I created this strip called "Fakeout" about a young high school girl with horn rim glasses who, in 1963, is visited by her future self and gets to go back in time and live through the Kennedy assassination and horny jocks with the knowledge of someone from the seventies:



I was paid $15 a week for the comic strip and it was not an overnight success and in fact, among the readers it was a love hate-deal. One hippie mailed in this one-line comment: "Fakeout is f###ed, period!"

Still, I was channeling my own experience in the Exits. Yes, that is Bugs Waters, above, left. And I was also playing on the Vietnam War:



Chapo Sanchez was a composite of several vatos and In-dins I grew up with and that is Mr. Wallace at the black board. He was our civics teacher.

Of course, in every band there is the clueless bandmate who doesn't know the key to any of the four songs the band knows and that person in the Exits shall remain nameless. Rhonda Rhodes is based on several cheerleaders I knew from Kingman and Connie Sitz, the heroine is loosely based on this girl:



This is a frame taken from an 8mm film of a dance at the American Legion in Kingman in 1964.

Anyway, fast forward to 1983 or 84 and I'm in Hollywood to meet two screenwriters who the studio (Columbia) wants to write a screenplay for Goldie Hawn to play my cartoon creation Honkytonk Sue. Jerry Leischling (sic) and Arlene Sarner have written a movie called "Peggy Sue Got Married" and in it, a woman (Kathleen Turner) gets to go back in time to her high school days and relive her life with the full knowledge of what happens, with the idea of changing the outcome (getting pregnant by her boyfriend and future husband, Nick Cage). It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Kathy and I go to the premiere and about five minutes in, she leans over and says, "Didn't you do a comic strip about this?"

I never mentioned "Fakeout" to either Jerry or Arlene because it would have sounded too, well, fake.

"Do you know what a penis is? Stay away from it."
—Kathleen Turner's mother's advice in Peggy Sue Got Married