FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jan. 26, 2012

CATHY GUISEWITE DISCUSSES LIFE AFTER "CATHY" IN HOGAN'S ALLEY #18

Atlanta, GA — She's gone from AACK to AARP.

After braving 34 years of deadlines, Cathy Guisewite retired her popular comic strip, "Cathy," in October 2010. In a career-spanning interview in the recently published Hogan's Alley #18, Guisewite said she chose to hang up her pens while at the top of her profession to spend more time with her daughter as she finished high school and to visit her parents in Florida more frequently.

Guisewite also said she never expected to become a cartoonist, despite a love of the medium stemming from her childhood exposure to "Peanuts." She credits her mother with prodding her into submitting her idea for a single working woman to a newspaper syndicate. "My entire goal with my submission package was to get my mother off my back," she said "My goal was not to do a comic strip. It was to make mom quit telling me I could do a comic strip."

But after 34 years of strips, bushel baskets of licensed merchandise, awards from her peers and a handful of appearances on the "Tonight" show with Johnny Carson, Guisewite stepped away and opted not to allow her work to be syndicated in reruns, an increasingly popular path for well-known retiring strips. "I wanted to get back to an actual blank page in my brain," she told Hogan's Alley. "And I wanted specifically not to have the next thing that I wanted to do figured out. I want to be open to whatever that is."

Hogan's Alley #18 also examines the circumstances surrounding Charles Schulz's introduction of Franklin, an African American child, into "Peanuts." It took a correspondence with a fan, Harriet Glickman, to persuade Schulz to integrate his cast of characters. Glickman provides her reminiscences in the article. "I always refer to Franklin," she said, "as my fourth child."

Hogan's Alley explores vintage and contemporary cartooning. Available in comics shops and on newsstands nationwide, Hogan's Alley is one of the nation's most respected voices on cartooning. Its website is http://www.hoganmag.com

Contact: Tom Heintjes, Publisher, 770-315-1215 or at hoganmag@gmail.com.