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Felix's Friends
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| "Felix's Friends" (subtltled "A Story for Grownups and Unpleasant Children") was a reworked and expanded version of an earlier tale "Phyllis's Friends," which had been imbedded as a story-within-a-story in Muddlebrow — Muddlebrow being a little-noticed comic strip series of mine that appeared in a short-lived feminist tabloid called Granny. Nobody remembers Granny now (somebody correct me about that if I'm wrong), but it made a bit of a splash in the New York of 1970, thanks to the keen promotional instincts of its editor, Julie Brumlik, who soon thereafter came into her own as the proprietor of the world's most creative typesetting company, Scarlett Letters.
The sad tale of Phyllis the floating girl was inspired by a member of our hippie crowd who had a special talent for drawing everyone around her into the vortex of her bad LSD trips, creating sullen resentments in the process that led to secret fantasies of somehow throwing her overboard in a way that we wouldn't have to feel guilty about. (Both she and I have grown older and wiser in the years since then, I should add, and at this point she is a much-valued pal whom I would never in a million years allow to float away into the sky — even if she asked.) But back to the "Felix's Friends" back-story. My comic strip Muddlebrow, I must admit, had nothing to do with feminism and had no major female characters, so its appropriateness as a regular feature in Granny was open to question. But Granny's editor, the aforementioned Julie, was a personal friend who wanted to give my cartoons some visibility in the Big Apple. Bless her heart! How innocent we all were about the rules of identity politics in those days! Anyway, many years later a fledgling small-press publisher invited me to send her something to publish. I reworked "Phyllis's Friends" and sent it to her. In the new version my central character became male. I feared that accusations of misogyny would fall on my head if I offered the world a female character so thoroughly unpleasant. My would-be publisher never got her small press off the ground, unfortunately, so I included my orphaned story in Dancin' Nekkid with the Angels. Artwork ©1986 by Howard Cruse |
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