Thursday, September 23, 1999
Strip #4 is up, and Connie is finally in it. Also: the counter went past 1,000 on Wednesday night, nine days after I put this page up. I woke Connie up to tell her. She was very nice about it. Thank you, all of you, and especially the parents of twins who've written from all over. It turns out there are a lot of us, and we're all tired.

Monday, September 20, 1999
Strip #3 is up. My mother has seen it. She would like everyone to know that she could hear the whole thing over the phone, and that she knew exactly what was going on by the first CLANG. Also, to the several kind people who wrote to ask whether the twins are identical: they're a boy and a girl, so no. Connie explained why to me again. She's very patient.

Thursday, September 16, 1999
Strip #2 is up, and on time, which is the first thing I've done on time since February of 1997.

Monday, September 13, 1999
Welcome to NAP TIME! It's a comic strip about our twins, Rebecca and Luke, and about me trying to keep up with them. I've wanted to draw a comic strip since I was ten years old, and I've wanted a nap since the day they were born. This page is as close as I can get to both at once. New strips go up Mondays and Thursdays, nap time permitting.

Hi. I'm Marvin McGonagle. I'm 35, I live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I'm a stay-at-home dad, which is a job I didn't know I could have until I had it.

For eleven years I was an insurance claims adjuster. I drove all over eastern Iowa looking at hail damage and bent fenders and writing down what things were worth. Then in February of 1997 Connie had the twins, and we sat down at the kitchen table with a calculator and the price list from the day care and did the arithmetic. Connie's a pharmacist. She loves her work, she's very good at it, and it came with the better insurance. I make a good grilled cheese. So I stayed home, and I've been home ever since, and I wouldn't trade it, even on the days I would.

Connie is 34 and works days at the pharmacy. She is small and brisk and she can get two toddlers into their shoes and out the door while I'm still looking for my keys. I've watched her do it a hundred times. I still don't know how.

Rebecca and Luke are two and a half. Rebecca talks all day long, in whole paragraphs, and she runs everything: who sits where, who's the dragon, which cereal has the prize. Luke says very little. He watches, he thinks it over, and he eats. I can't remember the last time I saw Luke without something in his mouth, and I've stopped asking where he gets it.

NAP TIME is the four of us, more or less. I draw everybody the way they are, give or take a few hairs in my case, and everything in it happened at our house or came close. The kids are too little to say whether they mind being in a comic strip, so I made myself one rule: nothing goes in NAP TIME that would embarrass them when they're sixteen. Connie gets a veto. She's used it once. You can meet everybody on the cast page.

Every strip is drawn by hand at the kitchen table during the twins' afternoon nap. They go down around one o'clock. If they both go down, I've got about two hours. If only one goes down, I've got an assistant. A strip takes me two nap times, three if somebody's getting a tooth.

1. Pencil. I work on a pad of watercolor paper, the kind with a little bumpy texture to it. I rule off four panels and sketch everything in lightly, balloons and all, so I know the words will fit.

2. Ink. Then I go over the pencil with a fine pen and waterproof ink. It has to be waterproof. The first time I tried this I used a regular pen, and the paint turned every line into a little gray puddle, and Rebecca looked at it and said "uh-oh," which was fair. The lettering goes in now too, by hand, in capitals. When the ink is good and dry I erase the pencil.

3. Paint. Watercolor goes on last, from a little pan set Connie gave me for Christmas and one round brush. I go light, because you can always put more paint on and you can never take any off. Where the paint pools it dries a little blotchy. I've decided that's my style.

4. Drying. Wet watercolor paper curls up like a potato chip, so the finished strip spends the night under the phone book with a dish towel on top.

5. Scanning. We don't have a scanner. Connie does, sort of. There's one in the office at the pharmacy, and after they close she scans the strip on it. (She asked first. That's Connie.) She carries the strip to work in a folder so it doesn't get bent, and brings it home on a floppy disk in her coat pocket.

6. Putting it up. Early the next morning, before anybody else is awake, I sit down with a cup of coffee, type the number and the date across the top in Paint Shop Pro, shrink it to 400 pixels wide and save it as a JPEG of about 40K. People keep telling me to use GIFs, but a GIF only gets 256 colors, and it turns a watercolor sky into a paint-by-number. Then I put the strip up here, finish the coffee, and go get the twins.

Every strip has a big version too, 640 pixels wide and about 100K, for anybody who wants to see the brush marks and has a few minutes to wait for them.

If you'd like to put NAP TIME on your own page, thank you! Here's a little button. Please save it to your computer and put it on your page as naptime.gif, instead of loading it off mine, and then paste in this:

Then drop me a line and tell me where it went. I'll come and visit after bedtime.

When I get a minute to read somebody else's comic, it's usually one of these two:

• Kevin & Kell -- a rabbit married to a wolf, raising a blended family, with a new strip every single day since 1995. Every day. I would love to know how.
• Dr. Fun -- one-panel gag cartoons, going since 1993, which makes it one of the oldest comics on the Web.