... let me suggest you seek it out. The death of cartoonist Arriola at age 90 sent me to my bookshelves to revisit one of my favorite strips. Arriola was probably best known as a gag-a-day man, but the ones I enjoyed the most tended to be the continuity adventures.

Thanks to Bob Harvey, I have my favorite story in collected form. It appears in his still-available Accidental Ambassador Gordo: The Comic Strip Art of Gus Arriola and involves the characters Gordo, Poet, and Rusty Gates (the last of the three being a waitress at a local restaurant). At $27 (less than the price of 10 average comics today), it'll give hours and hours of delicious entertainment.

Other Arriola collections include:

Gordo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950)

Nitty Gritty 1972 color paperbacks from Concord, Calif: Bug Rogers, Gordo's Pets, Gordo the Lover, Ponce deLeon, Poosy Gato, Popo and the Sun, Tehuana Mama, and Those Playworms Porfirio and Panchito

Gordo's Cat (San Diego, Calif.: Oak Tree, 1981)

Gordo's Critters (Berkeley, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1989)

His gorgeous sense of design makes the originals of his strips a lovely addition to any wall; I have three currently framed and hanging, and somewhere in My Stuff is a fourth I must dig out soon, since it's a re-drawing of my favorite sequence in the strip, a sequence he revisited a few years after the original telling in the mid-1950s.

I've spent some time this morning scanning art I'll post tomorrow. In the meantime, here's the text from the closing panel of the March 2, 1985, strip that saw Gordo married to Tehuana Mama:

"Dear Friends -- After 43 years of relentless delineation, today we draw ... a conclusion.

"Through this popular medium, we have tried to maintain a daily awareness of our southern neighbor, creating an interest in its history and culture with entertaining human-interest situations. We hope that it has made some measurable contribution to inter-American understanding.

"Given the nature of current rising tides, it behooves us to steer Gordo's little ark of decorum to saner shores.

"To all of you who have written such warm words of appreciation and to the publishers, who provided the forum, heartfelt gracias.

"We leave with a line from Yeats -- 'But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.'

"Ta ta! Hasta la vista! Love, Mary Frances Sevier and Gus Arriola."