I think that what fascinates me about this is the strange, ambiguous things it has to say about artistic genius and compromise. We're sometimes taught that to be any good, artists have to be so uncompromising and uncomplicit with the Man that they toil in obscurity and die poor. Yet here's a case where, mostly because he was young and didn't know any better, this guy let himself get roped into an amazingly compromised situation dreamed up by tasteless idiots, ended up standing firm on some things and caving in on others (he actually let them make him draw a heart on its chest!)—and it turned out in the end that his vision was simply stronger than the one he was given, and after enough years the syndicate actually begged him to turn the strip into the one he wanted to draw in the first place.