The old National Lampoon magazine had two great strips that I thoroughly enjoyed: Shary Fleniken's "Trots and Bonnie" (which just cries out for a compilation book), and Gahan Wilson's "Nuts". The title is a bit of a take-off and homage to "Peanuts", but Schulz's strip, great as it was, was not really about children. "Nuts", however, is a memoir of childhood, pretty close to my era, and it is dead-on true to life and drop-dead funny (using the word "dead" twice here seems appropriate in describing Gahan Wilson's work). Some of these strips, I swear, were drawn by somebody who looked back through time to my own childhood, and others seem so familiar to me that they must be from some collective unconscious of childhood memory. ( )

"Nuts" was one of my favorite regular strips in the old "National Lampoon" magazine. It featured "the Kid", and was all about how it useta be to be a kid. Wilson must be about my age, because this funny and well-drawn strip really strikes a chord with me. The kid is a fairly typical 9-year old (or so), bored by the rules and grownups in his life, but willing to do the bare minimum to stay out of trouble, and clueless why the rest of the world doesn't seem to like the same neat things a kid (boy kid, that is) enjoys. ( )