Jim McNeillie, my father, started drawing in his green sketchbook in 1979 after traveling through Europe that spring. It was around that time that he was playing the piano in a Toronto pub and he met my mother. He wrote her name all over the cover of his book. In 1981 they married.

Dad was working then as the chief steward at a cafe in Toronto. One day on his break he drew a comic strip on the back of a dessert menu. He was shocked to find that with nothing more than a pen and a little paper he could draw a comic strip that looked exactly like a comic strip. This was the first The Zoo. Dad enrolled in a class on cartooning and put together more than one hundred and fifty episodes of the strip in format suitable for syndication. Meanwhile my two sisters and I came along.

In 1989 we moved to a big old redbrick house in a tiny little town and got a rambunctious dog. Dad kept drawing. In his evenings and on his weekends he developed the single-panel strip The Academy. I remember Mom trying to keep us busy and quiet with snacks and crafts and distractions so dad could concentrate in his studio. It was all she could do to keep us from sneaking out of her attention and breaking in on Dad, because nothing is more tempting to a kid than a forbidden room. After we were asleep she and Dad would work together inking the strips and applying Letratone textures.

Dad published a few strips and collected a few charming rejection letters but didn't find the audience he was looking for.

Eventually the comics and the sketchbooks got put away in a box in one of our big closets. Dad made up stories to tell us girls about crayon doors drawn on walls that become real at midnight and ugly shoes that could make you run around the entire world faster than you could blink. We had picnics and snow forts and barbeques.

Life was good.

And that should have been the end of the story, but in a house full of kids, things packed away in closets are never really forgotten. Unbeknownst to our parents, my sisters and I snuck through all the drawers and boxes, combing through Mom's costume jewelry and yearbooks and Dad's photographs and rail cards from Europe and his box of cartoons and sketchbooks. As I got older I realized that not all fathers had boxes of comics hidden away and I started to appreciate just how much work Dad had done and what a treasure that box was. It deserved an audience. At family meals and on telephone calls, I began to try to persuade my father to let me put his comics online.

He finally relented one day and brought out his big box. This is where you can see what was inside of it.

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