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right out carrying a snow shovel, and I thought I was going to have to make a run for it. But Dad was heading for my snowball, not me. And in less than a minute, he reduced all our hard work for nothing. Rowley came by a few minutes later. I thought he might actually get a kick out of what happened.

But I guess he had his heart set on rolling that snowball down the hill, and he was really mad. But get this: Rowley was mad at me for what DAD did. I told Rowley he was being a big baby, and we got in a shoving match. Right when it looked like we were going to get in an all-out fight, we got ambushed from the street. It was a hit-and-run by the Whirley Street kids.

And if Mrs. Levine, my English teacher, was there, I'm sure she would have said the whole situation was "ironic." Wednesday Today at school they announced there's an opening for the cartoonist job in the school paper. There's only one comic slot, and up until now this kid named Bryan Little has been hogging it all to himself. Bryan has this comic called "Wacky Dawg," and

when it started off, it was actually pretty funny. But lately, Bryan's been using his strip to handle his personal business. I guess that's why they gave him the axe. As soon as I heard the news, I knew I had to try out. "Wacky Dawg" made Bryan Little a celebrity at our school, and I wanted to get in on some of that kind of fame. I had a taste of what it's like to be famous at my school when I won honorable mention in this antismoking contest they had. nkledc. All I did was trace a picture from one of Rodrick's heavy metal magazines, but luckily, no one ever found out.

The kid who won first place is named Chris Carney. And what kind of ticks me off is that Chris smokes at least a pack of cigarettes a day. Thursday Me and Rowley decided to team up and do a cartoon

together. So after school today he came over to my house, and we got to work. We banged out a bunch of characters real quick, but that turned out to be the easy part. When we tried to think up some jokes, we kind of hit a wall. I finally came up with a good solution. I made up a cartoon where the punch line of every strip is "Zoo-Wee Mama!" That way we wouldn't get bogged down with having to write actual jokes, and we could concentrate on the pictures. For the first couple of strips, I did the writing and drew the characters, and Rowley drew the boxes around the pictures.