Cartoonist Sandra Bell-Lundy is interviewed about her Between Friends comic strip, her greeting card line, cartooning and other topics. Or as Michelle Tompkins for Celebrity Cafe puts it:
Sandra Bell-Lundy covers women, relationships, wine, chocolate, work, family, caffeine, friendships and more.
Sandra Bell-Lundy writes about things that interest her. Her stories are funny, relevant, and kind. They feature different, but amazing women and their families. She isn’t scared to take on tough subjects covered in compassionate, yet realistic ways suitable for a family-friendly comic including: divorce, uncertainty with work, fertility problems, dating issues, kids having fits while in public, women’s health and domestic violence. But at the center of everything is the three friends.
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.
Michelle Tompkins: Now your domestic violence story is incredibly memorable. What kind of feedback did you receive on that?
Sandra Bell-Lundy: The response was overwhelming. I heard from abused women, parents, clergy, university professors, high school teachers, law enforcement and more. When the final weeks of the story appeared in the newspapers I was flooded by e-mail every morning. Some of the mail was tough to read and several times I sat at my computer and just cried.
Michelle Tompkins: How does geography factor into your work?
Sandra Bell-Lundy: My characters are Canadian but it doesn’t figure into the strip in a big way. Mostly, I get edited (or at least questioned) for Canadian-ized references that don’t make sense to my American editor. I draw milk in a bag.
