ngtime followers of the “Luann” comic strip may have noticed a few surprise guests in the audience at Brad and Toni’s wedding in the Sunday morning funny pages.
The color single-panel strip on Dec. 11 showed the bride and groom saying their “I dos” before a crowd of comic characters that included — in the back row on the right — creator/cartoonist Greg Evans, his wife, Betty, and their 37-year-old daughter, Karen.
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The San Marcos cartoonist said he and Karen, who co-writes the strip, made their first appearance two years ago when title character Luann (Brad’s teenage sister) turned 18. But this is the first time Betty has ever been drawn in the strip since he launched it on March 17, 1985. It’s now syndicated in more than 400 newspapers and websites.
The wedding of firefighters Brad and Toni has been in the works since their tearful engagement in April 2013 and began playing out over the past two weeks as the couple arrived at the wedding hall in the nick of time after fighting a remote wildfire.
Greg and Karen Evans have been building anticipation for the nuptials since the summer when they launched an audience-interactive contest. Fans were invited to submit their own designs for Toni’s wedding dress and 600 submissions were uploaded to the luannfan website.
More than 46,000 votes were cast and the winning entry was drawn by Redwood City artist Phillip Gust, who Evans said is active in the online virtual reality costuming world. Gust’s design, which received 2,204 votes, is a white sleeveless dress with a blue flower at the waist. In place of a veil, Toni’s hair is French-braided with flowing blue and gold ribbons.
Besides getting involved in designing and voting, nearly 1,800 “Luann” fans also signed a wedding guestbook that Karen created on the fan site. And 250 more posted their good wishes for the happy couple in the comments section of the strip’s site at Luanncomic.com.
“When Karen came up with the idea for the book I thought we’d get maybe nine people,” he said. “I mean, who would sign up for a fictitious character’s wedding and a virtual invite to a fake wedding? I was wrong.”
Evans said writing and drawing the wedding plot has been harder work than planning a real-life one.
“I think with a real wedding you’re just trying to make it as smooth and beautiful as possible, but when you’re trying to plan an interesting wedding you want hiccups and problems to make it different from all the other weddings you’ve seen in movies and TV shows,” he said.
For the rest of this week, the strip will focus on the wedding reception. To fill out the guest list, Evans said he dug up several characters from the strip’s past who appeared Sunday and will be in a few panels coming up.
They include fellow firefighters, the fire station captain and fire academy instructor and one of Toni’s friends. Orphaned with her brother as a child, Toni was raised by an aunt who appeared Sunday and will be introduced this week. Also pictured Sunday were Luann’s closest friends Gunther and Bernice, Brad’s Aunt Vicki (last seen in the strip 20 years ago) and his first girlfriend Diane.
The wedding is the culmination of a long and often-troubled courtship between Brad and Toni, who first met at an EMT course in a strip Evans drew in 2002. Luann, a character who has only aged from adolescence to college freshman over the past 31 years, served as Toni’s maid of honor.
While Greg Evans continues to draw the strip daily, his daughter Karen has been helping him write the story line since 2012.
Karen, a San Marcos resident who works as a consultant for charter school education programs, was the original inspiration for “Luann.” Her dad said one day he saw 5-year-old Karen — the youngest of his and Betty’s three children — walking around their Twin Oaks Valley home dressed in her mom’s clothing and he thought he could do a lot with a strip about an imaginative girl.
He said he’s been deeply gratified by the public’s response to this month’s wedding.
“Some of the wishes people wrote in the book are so beautiful. They think of these characters as real people,” he said. “It makes me feel very humble and appreciative.”
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