I sat down recently and counted the number of pages of Tales I’ve finished. Not just the ones I’ve drawn myself, but also by the collaborators I’ve hired to illustrate Tales. Not counting the illustrated prose Travel Tales (which don’t have a specific number of pages to them), the total came to 599! That’s close enough to a major milestone, that I wanted to celebrate it, so I set aside the multi-page stories I’m working on, and did a single-page story pin-up. Here it is, albeit out of the chronological sequence I’ve been following.

There are some people who argue that a single panel like this is not “comics”, on the grounds that there is no panel-to-panel sequence of events. One of Bil Keene’s Sunday “Family Circus” installments showing Jeffy’s path around the playground, or a Carmine Infantino splash page of Flash zipping around a scene, easily refutes that argument. Even just a word balloon can add the dimension of time to a single panel: it isn’t a snapshot, it’s a scene. In this case, not only is there a sequence of events implied, there’s also a little bit of business in the title graphics, tweaking the “Home Alone” movie logo to make it part of the storytelling. Look close and you’ll see someone’s parents about to walk in the front door. Voila: Sequential Art.