Peggy is a strip I wrote and drew in the late 1980s  –  easy to tell by looking at the original Nintendo console that Peggy plays using Atari joysticks, and Tommy's "boom box."  Hard to believe there was entertainment before the internet, Ipods, and Playstations.  When I stumbled onto the Comic Strip Superstar contest sponsored by Andrews McMeel Publishing, I thought, why not?  The fact that Peggy made it into the top 50 is pretty cool.  It almost makes me want to start working on comic strips again.  The ten strips that made it into the top ten are amazing. I particularly like Girl which is surprisingly close to Peggy in terms of setting and theme, but Girl is much better drawn and is way more charming.  I was surprised by how many of the submitted strips paired a human character with either an animal or other types of imaginary characters... the influence of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes continues to loom large.  Here's the blurb I submitted with the strip:

Peggy is a young misfit who lives in a timeless world of video-game-fueled imagination.  Her only friends are a nerd-savant who believes pigeons are containers for transmigrated souls, and an obnoxious duck who refuses to fly south.  Peggy has the same anxieties as other kids, but the ways she deals with them is always unique.

I realize now, twenty years later, that Peggy is pretty derivative of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes so I never figured the strip had a chance, even though Schulz is now gone and no strip is really mining the same sort of material.  But the contest was still a blast.  I do wish the syndicates would stop running reprint strips –  like Peanuts and For Better or For Worse –  to give more strips like Girl a chance to take their place.  -jg