Capes-n-Babes

Folks… I am not going to have any new strips this week for Capes & Babes.

On Saturday morning, my father-in-law, Robert Clover passed away. He must have felt he had spent too much time away from his beloved wife, and decided it was time to be with her. In just a few weeks, he would have been 76. “Pop” – as I called him – was the inspiration for “Bob the Barber”, but in reality, there was no “inspiration” behind the character. They were one and the same. “Pop” was, at one time, a barber in real life. In fact, whenever he would make a visit to our house, he would always have his old barber tools with him and made it a habit of cutting either my hair or my son’s hair. I think that’s maybe one of the reasons why my son currently loves to visit the barber shop… maybe in all that autistic circuitry of his, visiting the barber is his way of remembering his grand dad.

In any case, I always considered myself to be very fortunate to have had such a great relationship with both of my in-laws. And I very much enjoyed joking around with my father-in-law about his fishing skills. One of my favorite stories is that one summer weekend, when I knew they were planning on visiting us, I thought I’d surprise this old fisherman by going out and getting a bunch of steamed crabs and beer for the both of us to enjoy. It had been a few years since we had seen each other so I thought it would be a great time to just hang out and enjoy some crabs.

But when I told him what I had done, it was only then did he inform me that he hated eating crabs. Needless to say, I was quite taken back that a fisherman hated eating a particular kind of seafood. And I didn’t quite know what to do. I mean, anyone who has seen me eat crabs knows I can put a hearty amount away but for that weekend, I had bought way too much even for me to eat all by myself.

Fortunately, my mother-in-law stepped up and WE ate the crabs and drank the beer all weekend long. Those two will be missed very much by not only their very large family but a whole lot of other people they touched during their lives as well.

My mother-in-law passed away a few years before I started Capes & Babes but almost as soon as I realized I wanted to put the comic book shop in a strip mall, I also realized I wanted to put a barber shop in there as well – and I immediately knew exactly who I wanted in that barber shop. “Bob the Barber” was THE first Capes & Babes character I based off of a real person and drawn, essentially, as a caricature.