This comic is being reworked currently. Expect revisions regularly on existing and new material.

To Be Continued… Issue 2 coming July.

TOBY’S SOAPBOX

That’s all for now! A cliffhanger? If you don’t want to be unsatisfied for the rest of your life, make sure to check out chapter 2, likely coming some time in July, or August at the latest. Don’t be forced to live with your choice to skip this innovative mag for the rest of time.

You may have noticed some similarities between this and Earl the Squirrel. Believe it or not, I started this book around October of 2023. It started as prose story.

Then, it was talking animals, completely independent of Earl! I still have some of those original pages lying around somewhere but, of course, eventually I restarted with humans. (Dove was a cat, and Oak was a rabbit.) Then someone requested an Earl the Squirrel love story, so I stole a lot of the structure and story from this comic and put it into Earl the Squirrel. You’ll see that they will end up going in very different directions. Technically, this came first.

60s pop art techniques were borrowed, in the same way many of the stylistic hallmarks of pop art were originally “borrowed” from comics.

The ending ad of “Do You Know Where Your Children Are?” is a classic PSA from the 60s that is now iconic. It was created after youth curfews were put in place in certain large cities. This chapter takes place between 11:00 pm (a typical start time of these curfews) and sunrise.

The 1960s also famously hosted one of the most important counterculture movements in American history, which spawned the war on drugs.

Candy cigarettes, although still available for purchase, are another relic of the past. They are illegal in a ton of countries and are pretty heavily regulated in the U.S. A 1990 study showed that kids who smoked candy cigarettes were twice as likely to become smokers. Now we just have candy flavored vapes, which are, of course, intended for adults.

Every bit of the information in the Nalaxone page is true. Nalaxone is the active ingredient in Narcan.

Is the title of this comic weird? Yes! But it’s pretty much the only combination of words meaning youth and love that hasn’t been made into a comic already.

If I could have titled the comic “Young Romance,” I would have, but DC seems to own that now (even though they didn’t originally own that title).

The letters page is one of the best reasons to keep up with comics. They still exist, although their use is nowhere near as widespread. It adds a level of interactivity that I miss, and gives creatives a chance to gauge reactions. In a lot of classic books you can find letters from children who would go on to become some of the best writers, artists, and editors in comics. Fun fact: the resurrection of The Phoenix of the X-men was an idea suggested in the letters page from a kid named Kurt Busiek, who eventually wrote some of the best comics Marvel has ever seen (see “Marvels”). Fun Fact 2: the “Suicide Squad” comic had trouble with its letters page because fans were labeling their letters, “Suicide Notes,” which the United States Postal Service objected to.

The “AS NARRATED TO” credits box is a tribute to another tradition of classic romance comics.

The stories in these comics were supposedly true! Were they true? Nope! But they sure pretended to be. I’ll let you decide of Dove and Oak are real people. Maybe the story really was narrated to me. I’ll never tell.

Oh but the questions you must have, dear reader. Is this part of the Earl the Squirrel universe ;)? Will Oak actually get his sweater back? Can we please get more of that talking squirrel character? (What are you? Some Squirrel loving NUT!?!) When will this soapbox section finally end? Some of these answers, and MORE, in Chapter 2.

And don’t worry, there will only be three chapters (as of now) so you’ll get the full story in only 54 pages!

And hey, if you’ve got a problem with this comic, frankly, sometimes I do not like my way of making comics. But I like my way of doing it better than my way of not doing it! Let me get back to work on the story before I forget the whole thing.

Until the next time Earl-Nuts. Stay nutty.

-Former King of Comics, Tobias Kant