Americana: Comic Splits

In the first panel, Carmen Singleton picks up the phone. "How nice of you to call, Mother." In the second panel, she is outraged: "What do you mean it was all my fault, I wasn't good enough for him, and if he had any sense he would have left me years ago!" Then she realizes her mistake. "Oh," says Carmen, "it's his mother."

Carmen is, of course, recently divorced. She is also the female lead in a new comic strip that now appears in 15 newspapers. The nation's first comic strip about divorce, Splitsville tries—and mostly succeeds—to laugh at the ridiculous, sad and foolish foibles of couples that can't live together.

Where do creators Frank Baginski and Reynolds Dodson get their ideas? Real life, obviously. Dodson has been divorced twice and has four children. Baginski is living with a divorced woman and her two children.