Benny & Sid Presents The Truant Officer, Chapter 1

You're just a click away from the serialized graphic novel "The Truant Officer", by Glen Bledsoe.

by Glen Bledsoe

(Your City, USA) - The nightstand next to your bed spills over with dog-eared paperbacks by authors like Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Donald Westlake.

You selected the latest addition to your wardrobe from here, and every time you toss it into the laundry you pull it back out and wear it just one more time because it's so incredibly truck-stop.

Now I've got something for you. It's black and it's white and it's got 256 levels of gray--not to mention grit and guts and maybe even a pair of brass knuckles.

This ain't your grandma's comic with the Katzenjammer Kids stealing pies and pulling the cat's tail. This is the story about a man with a job to do. It's not pretty job. It's not a job you researched on Career Day when you were a senior in high school. It's a job that didn't have 200 applications the first day it opened. Nobody applied for it who'd earned a Ph.D. It's a job for a loner, but it's a job for a guy with high principles.

The story is also about kids who can't seem to get to school and parents who can't lift themselves off their flop in front of the boob tube to check to see if their little darlings are taking the ride on a big, yellow, school bus or hiding in the family camper in the back yard.

Just maybe it's a story about you, too. Maybe your life is a little too cozy and maybe you've forgotten that the battle to break the poverty cycle is fought every day in the classrooms of America. It's a take-no-prisoners kind of war. Every kid stands shoulder-to-shoulder with every other kid, or, at least, that's the idea. No Child Left Behind, but nobody believes that anymore for good reason.

Enough belly-aching. You're just a click away from the story of The Truant Officer.

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Leonardo (Glen L. Bledsoe), Salem-News.com cartoonist, was born and raised in Indiana. He graduated from Indiana University with a Bachelors of Art in Fine Arts and was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for several years. Glen made his home in Oregon in the early 80's where he continues to enjoy the mild climate and lack of sales tax.

He and his wife Karen have published seventeen books together for the school library market. Glen has written extensively on the issues of technology and education for the National Education Association and other publications. When he is not creating this unique cartoon series, Glen is either teaching, writing a novel, composing music, or reading.