CARTOONS AND LOVE-LIKE PEANUT BUTTER AND CHOCOLATE
Waverly's World began, sorta kinda, in notebooks from High School, but became a full fledged entity in notebooks in college.

Here's the deal- I was at UCONN (University of Connecticut) and I was getting over a what may be fairly deemed a soul-crushing breakup. That special kind of pathetic heartache that finds it's afflicted taking pointless miles-long walks, just to MOVE, or waking up at 4:00 in the morning for NO REASON, and just staring, hopelessly and painfully AWAKE, but unwilling to do anything but sit and stare until the sun comes up. In this oh-so-horrible state, these sort of walking wounded will do many embarrasing things- sick volumes of meaning are read into chance eye-contact with checkout clerks, chicken-scratch scrawling stream of consciousness runs alongside looseleaf that should be used for Physics notes...It's not a pretty thing.

So there I was, heart torn asunder, and in a self-imposed exile from the world. For lack of anything better to do, I began to amuse myself with drawing cartoons. The first of which were bitter, acrimonious diatribes against life, love, and all that stuff. But they started to just get goofy, and kinda funny. My friend Brian who lived in the room next door read some of them, and showed his friends. Soon my notebooks had a fan-base, and I started to come out of my self-imposed prison. The adventures of Waverly and Miniver and Brick Brickman had a very small, but very loyal following. (Incidentally, let me try to use the power of the web, and see if I can't let the whole 6 degrees of separation concept work for me. If anybody knows a smooth, handsome black man named Brian Powell, tell him to email his old friend Josh.)

Next year, I transferred to a different school, and met this insanely beautiful, amazingly smart and wonderful girl. We were in a play together; I was convinced that she MUST be out of my league, but was so stricken with her that I had to try SOMETHING. We got to talking, and started hanging out.Being a dork, my way of wooing, in part,was to draw funny comics... I gleeped her books while she was rehearsing, and peppered them with little characters. Eventually I showed her the "collected works" of the oddly continuity-bound strip, and she convinced me to put them in the school paper...I did, under the title of "BRAINSTORM." And there was much rejoicing.

I eventually convinced this girl to marry me, thus securing my title as the world's luckiest person ever. In a very odd, butterfly-wing-in-China-affecting-the-course-of-a-hurricane-in-Kansas way, this strip, and these characters inadvertantly helped push my life in the right direction, so I'd be at the right place and the right time to find the most absolute RIGHT person in all of existence. For this reason, Waverly, and the gang, have a very special place in my heart, and I thank them very much.