Michelle Tompkins:  The adoption arch struck a chord with many people.  How did you come up with that?

Sandra Bell-Lundy:  When I began the strip, it featured three women…one single, one divorced and one married. No children. I gave birth to my first child at the same time my strip launched with King Features and I had my second a few years later.

Eventually, the influence of having kids became too hard to ignore and I decided to bring kids into the strip. The problem for me was that my husband and I had experienced three miscarriages and had been to a fertility clinic. It was a very sad and frustrating time and after all that we had experienced, I just couldn’t bring myself to have my Susan character simply wake up one day and happily discover she was pregnant. The idea seemed like a big fat fairy tale to me.