SPOILER ALERT! Go read the strip if you aren’t caught up! Start HERE.
Ok, ready??
After years in Real Life and who knows how long in LUANNiverse time, Brad and Toni are finally starting a family! This momentous adventure is the result of a lot of thought and a dash of spontaneity, both on their part and ours. Enjoy Greg’s story of this story, Karen’s commentary on the timeline, and this month’s Featured Collection of Brad and Toni’s early thoughts about having kids.
Also: will you be at San Diego Comic Con this week? Come see us at the National Cartoonists Society booth #1307– we’d love to say hello!
‘Til next time,
~Karen and Greg
This Month’s Featured Collection
Hamster Time
Brad wants a family. Toni’s busy helping taking care of her brother’s. A hamster runs free. New rules are invented. And we start to wonder: will Brad and Toni ever have kids? Read the collection HERE!
That’s right: 24! It was twenty four years ago, in “Real” Time, that Brad decided to become a firefighter and met Toni in February of 2002. It then took them fourteen years to get married, even though in Strip Time they only aged a year or so. How do we know they aged? Well, in 2014 Luann aged for the second time in her life, turning 18 in September that year (and therefore, because he’s three years older, Brad quietly turned 21–how did we miss telling that story?!).
Luann’s 18th birthday
Luann had previously gone from being 13 when the strip started in 1985 to turning 16 in September of 1999. So, she spent about fourteen years being 13-ish, and about fifteen years being 16-ish, and has now been in college for 12 years. We think of Luann as being 19 now and trapped in her Sophomore year of college.
So: is there rhyme or reason to all of this? Nope. Sorry to disappoint. The characters just grow on their own and dictate when it’s time to make a big change. LUANN is unusual for a comic strip in this regard: the vast majority of strips have characters who stay the same age indefinitely.
Luann graduates high school in 2014
When Luann convinced us she was ready to move on from being in high school, I had just recently started working with my dad on the writing side. We spent several months deliberating what it would mean to graduate Luann and move her, and the other characters into college. Who would go where? What would happen to group dynamics? And, how would we show her Senior Year of high school unless we put the strip into Real Time? It just seemed too weird to have her be a Senior repeatedly. And so: for the first time in LUANN, the strip officially moved in Real Time for the 2013-2014 school year. Luann graduated, turned 18, started college, and life in the LUANNiverse subtly shifted back into murky Strip Time.
Meanwhile, Brad and Toni became firefighters, got married, and now, ten years later, they are “finally” starting a family…even though, in Strip Time, they are practically newlyweds because Luann is still 19 so Brad must be stuck being about 22.
All that to answer the question on too many readers’ minds: WILL TONI BE PREGNANT FOREVER? No no no, we are not going to have Toni’s pregnancy move in Strip Time. It’s bad enough that we’ve trapped Luann in teenhood for 41.5 years. We aren’t going to torture Toni, or our fans, with an indefinite pregnancy. Therefore, hold on to your hats, mark your calendars, get ready for Real Time: we will be welcoming a baby in March of 2027 💕
After that? Well. We’ll just have to let the characters decide.
A BABY? WHY NOW?
by Greg
Karen talks in her essay about the weird Comic Strip Time Conundrum in LUANN and it’s no more glaring than in Brad and Toni’s marriage. In the strip, they met in 2002, said “I Do” in 2016 and are now having their first child. In “Real” Time that would mean: if they met at age 20, they married at age 34 and are expecting a baby at age 44. But in Strip Time, they’re 22ish?
This partly answers the “why now” question. Karen and I began talking about Maybe Baby way back in ’02. But we kept kicking the can because, frankly, there’s a huge amount of thought, planning, “what-ifs” and repercussions involved in committing to such a story. But the longer we kicked, the more urgent it became.
Several months ago, we needed a quick fill-in week and I was tasked with coming up with something. For whatever reason, a Brad/Toni shower scene materialized in my head. Yes, we plan story arcs and scenarios, but quite often in writing the strip the characters do unexpected things. Here, Brad and Toni surprised me by getting extra amorous. When Karen saw the week, we looked at each other and said, “Hm. Should this be the time they get pregnant?” They’d been methodically trying for ages and this spontaneous, love-driven moment in the shower felt like the right moment.
Once the can was conclusively NOT kicked, we faced myriad questions: when will Toni know? How will she respond? When will she tell Brad? How will he respond? When will the due date be? When will they tell family? How will they respond? What about their firefighter jobs? Their living arrangement? Their finances? Will they opt to know the gender? Genders? And what should it be?
As Karen points out, this story will be told in real time. That presents a whole slew of challenges not the least of which is the task of drawing Toni in advancing stages of pregnancy. AND figuring out what the child will look like.
As much work as the Baby Saga will require, there are two things that make it worthwhile.
It’s an uplifting, joyful story – and who doesn’t need that these days?
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