I was a great fan of the brilliant "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip, which has ended but is being rerun in a lot of newspapers and available in collected form (I even splurged on the complete box set a while back). I also admire the write/artist who created it, Bill Watterson, who never yielded to the temptation to license his characters for the usual flood of products that come from a hit comic strip.
I think a worthy successor may be the strip called "Cul de Sac" by Richard Thompson.
In the final panel, which you don't see above, the little girl says, "That's IT?" and the boy says, "That's how school IS!"
You know what--that's how writing is, too. And maybe life.
