Post-revolutionary excess
Originally published 26 May 2001

One thing I've noticed is that, once you have an audience, you can expect them to react negatively any time you change anything.

It gets to be a little bit like the boy who cried wolf--if I actually made a change that was damaging to the strip, and readers wrote in to warn me, I probably wouldn't believe them.

Take Millie's fangs, which you can see clearly in the second panel here.

You never really saw anyone's teeth, in the strip's earliest days. But when I reworked the character designs, some of the characters--most notably Millie--acquired visible fangs, in the closeups. Some people loved it. But a lot of the mail I got complained about it--I heard frequently that it damaged the strip by making it "less cute."

I didn't agree then, and I still don't. This is Millie we're talking about--Millie, of all characters, should have sharp teeth. She's cute with an edge. And if the writing doesn't have prominent "teeth," I'm not doing my job--so why shouldn't the art match?

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