Comic Strip Rarities: Freedom 56, The Sandra Bell-Lundy Mini-Series
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Sandra Bell-Lundy has been cartooning Between Friends for 35 years and most of us have thought it was the only comic strip she has done during that time, but there was a four week period when she created a full-page weekly strip for a couple of Canadian broadsheets. It was what comic book fans would call a mini-series.
Freedom 56 (subtitled My First Year as an “Empty-Nester”) ran from August 16, 2014 to September 6, 2014.
I wrote this series when my daughter was preparing to head to Nova Scotia to attend university. My son was already away at school. This four-part series appeared in the Toronto Star and the Montreal Gazette. (I’ll upload each segment weekly) The title was a little play on that old insurance commercial about “Freedom 55”. I changed it to “Freedom 56” because, yeah you guessed it… I was 56 at the time. I received a fair bit of reader mail from the series…most of it was very heartfelt about getting used to their kids being gone. To all you about-to-be-empty-nesters…yes, sometimes you will miss them like crazy but it does eventually become the new normal.
Sandra has recently put the entire series up on her Sandra Bell-Lundy: My Cartooning Life substack in high definition and full color. It is a very good read for those whose children have flown the coop.
Spoiler alert for empty nesters: Sometimes those spare bedrooms are later refilled by a grandchild.
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