Capes-n-Babes

Today is my wife’s birthday. I’m not telling you how old she is (I want to live to see her NEXT birthday, after all) but if you want to wish her a happy birthday, you can do so by posting on her Facebook wall.

On Saturday, Capes & Babes will celebrate its four year anniversary. But it should be celebrating its four year anniversary today.

Back in late 2007, when I made the decision to start Capes & Babes, I did the wise thing of creating a buffer for myself before debuting the strip online. But once I had those strips complete, I needed a target date for which the debut would take place. I knew this date was going to be important so I didn’t just want to randomly select any old date. I wanted the date to be special and to mean something.

So, what could be more special than deciding to launch your strip on the same day of your wife’s birthday?

It seemed to make perfect sense at the time. Judi and I met in art school and ever since we’ve been a couple, she’s always been my biggest supporter when it came to cartooning, caricatures or whatever else I was doing at the time. When I decided to pull out my old college sketchbook and redesign all of the original Capes & Babes characters I had designed back then, Judi had a very big hand in helping me re-imagine Joey. She was the one who suggested I change her name form Jodi to Joey.

Launching the strip on her birthday was always intended to be a symbolic gesture of saying “thanks” to her for always being there for me, helping me find a way to finance my con trips, making other suggestions about characters and doing anything else to try and make Capes & Babes successful.

Unfortunately, back in 2007, her birthday fell on a Sunday. That wouldn’t jive with the Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule I already had planned, so I had to make a very tough decision to post-pone Capes & Babes’ “birthday” from November 11th and make it the 12th instead.

So, to my wife, on her very special day, I say this:
Babe, thanks so much for everything you do that I never say (or forget to say) “thanks for”. Thanks so much for being the mother that you are. And even though you always worry you’re not doing enough or whether you could be doing more – believe me, our house would crumble if it weren’t for you.

And I mean that (after all, you have a lock on all the power tools).

Thank you for being my biggest supporter and fan, my best friend (sorry, Jeff) and my deepest love.

I hope you have a very happy birthday.

PS: Consider this a cyber version of drawn flowers on your wind shield. 😉