Joyce and Walky!

Look, it’s a Fans! strip!  Written by T Campbell and Jason Waltrip usually, and also here.  No, this isn’t a Sunday strip.  All Fans! strips are full pages.  So, uh, Jason Waltrip kinda got a raw deal, havin’ to keep up with my seven-days-a-week schedule drawing full pages, while I kept on doing Sundays and dailies.  D’oh.

This is Shanna Cochran!  Her name is Shanna Cochran.  She was a normie who got stuck covering her college’s science fiction club.  Well, a recovering normie.  Of the Fans! characters, she’s the most fun to draw.

Here’s T Campbell’s words:

So, let’s kick off this escapist crossover yarn with some light and fluffy character exposition. We need a goofy hook too, like Clark Kent and Peter Parker getting assigned to cover the same event or Clark and Bruce Wayne booking seats on the same cruise ship. Or hey, how about some RELATIVES WITH EARLY-STAGE DEMENTIA, who’ll just ignore a random interdimensional jump?

Shanna Cochran is a journalist who mingles with science-fiction fans and is ever so slowly becoming one. Her mother Judith got into fandom around the same time that Judith began to lose her mind (future science “cured” her not long before this story, and you can probably guess how long that lasted). These two facts should tell you a lot about Shanna’s fears and anxieties, and they make her so awkward here that her stilted last balloon actually sounds about right to my ear.

At one time, print journalists like Shanna didn’t think much of TV channels like CNN, making Shanna’s second attempt at conversation here even more strained. These days, presidential attacks have shifted the landscape and weakened such old rivalries, sort of like they did at the end of The Post, only more permanently.