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A WORD FROM THE ARTIST ABOUT JUNE BUG VERSUS HURRICANE Being ignorant of the finer points of both Lil Abner and Pogo, and being a New Yorker myself, I'm not sure why I so badly and for so long wanted to make a hillbilly strip. Snuffy Smith I remembered from TV, though I don't remember it making much of an impression; and though I've been a fan of Roy Thompkins, Doug Allen and Gary Leib, I knew that their sardonic, white-trash hilarity wasn't what I was after either. Originally, I wanted to make a brooding, rural noir. So much for that idea. The pleasures of writing in that outlandish Faulknerian dialect also arise from I know not where; though I do remember my roommate Bob and I going through a happy phase back in Brooklyn when we spoke to each other in Southern accents (see Seinfeld's, "The Voice" episode). Mostly, I guess, having some time ago lost my taste for raw confession, I wanted the most comfortable masks through which to speak. June Bug and Hurricane came as a tribute to Lucinda Williams and her great song, 2 Kool 2 B 4-gotten. They arrived almost fully developed, as if I'd known them all my life. True outsiders, they are of the species that, as Sinatra sings it, hides from the light of the village square. Eccentric, neurotic, finally romantic, these kids would also serve as my pitiful yet gallant attempt to connect with Lucinda, who I had, after initially resisting, gone gaga over. Now, every time she sang that song, she would, in a delicious Borgesian reversal, be singing to me. I even thought, fuelled by necessary delusion, that it might even someday get me a meeting with her. Her or her lawyers.
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