All those PSAs and parental lecture were right — peer pressure can make a person do the darndest thing.

I can hear my mom’s voice now: “If Mike Sterling bought some original comics art, would you buy some, too?”

Well, yeah, mom. Mike is the coolest cat in the funnybook blogging scene, and that would still be true even if there weren’t only a half-dozen of us left standing in 2021.

Besides, it wasn’t as if Mike was trying to tempt me with a pack of purloined Parliament Lights. At most, he reminded me of a dormant goal which somehow failed to make it on my current wishlist. Scoring a favored page of comics art was a dream deferred by concerns about storage and display space, expense, and what page might possibly justify the above.

In an ideal world, it would be the Perez/Ordway group shot of the “Forgotten Heroes” which kicks of Crisis on Infinite Earths #12, but that’s never going to happen. So I settled for my second choice — a page of Henry Scarpelli art from A Date With Debbi.

As luck would have it, I managed to find a reasonably price page from issue #8 of the series, which also happened to have one of my favorite Debbi panels ever. It’s the third one in the above photo, in which Debbi exhibits the qualities which set her apart from her teen comedy genre peers (and may also mirror those occasionally displayed by a certain Queen of Animals).

Now it is in my possession, and I can proudly say that I own original artwork by a legendary teen humor illustrator and the father of one of the supporting cast members from Jennifer Slept Here.