Do you still maintain that you are bewildered by all the attention you seem to "accidentally" generate?

I don't know what to make of it. I just marvel at it. There's some sort of cosmic weirdness.

And you say you don't have any secret plan?

No, wouldn't that be nice? Because if there were I'd be making more money off it.

Still, you have to admit there's been this real confluence of events around you. The sunscreen issue is ongoing. Last summer there was the Rat Sludge splash, and now there's this character from the Kevin Costner movie, although you say you didn't really have any input there.

No, I didn't.

Did they consult you when they were making the movie?

Only inadvertently. I was sitting up in the library one day and somebody from the movie was taking pictures. I said "What are you taking pictures of?" And she said "I want to see how reporters dress."

It's not going to be a lot. The Tribune owns it. I will get half of what the Tribune gets. But the way it's structured, you have to buy the whole CD, which has 17 songs, only owe of which is based on my column.

So you're getting one half of one-seventeenth of the royalty?

Uh huh. I get half of the very tiny percentage of the track that's one- seventeenth of the CD.

Well it seems to me that the only song you hear about from that CD is yours. At Amazon all the reviews refer to "Everybody's Free."

I didn't have any expectation at all, but when it became clear to me that this was the track that was getting airplay and selling, and that this was the track people wanted, just as a citizen/bystander I had to ask the question "Why don't you release this as a single?" In the old days that's what you did.

Well, it's been a long time since singles have been a significant factor in record sales.

That's how out of it I am.

Do you think it's intentional that the narrator on the song sounds vaguely like Kurt Vonnegut? I mean, he's not a ringer, but he has that avuncular tone.

Gravitas.

Right but self-deprecating gravitas, which is very Vonnegut-esque. Have you talked to the record people about that?

I never asked about that. A number of people have remarked on that. Some people, women in particular, go: [in a namby-pamby singsong] "Oh, why did they have to have a man reading it? They should have had a woman." I think it's a very smart choice for the voice. It's odd; it's wise in some way. Because of that avuncular nature of it. Many people would listen to that voice dispense advice who wouldn't listen to a little female voice like mine.

Well that's an interesting thought, ha ha ha! But I still don't know if it would have had that sit-up-straight-and-listen quality.

The book Wear Sunscreen is 60-some pages long. What other items did you include, besides the sunscreen column?

Just the one column.

Really? How did they get 60 pages out of it?

Isn't that a good question. It's a sentence on a page.

Oh, come on!

It's not my doing. I just said "If you want to do a book with a sentence on a page, that's your choice."

No illustrations?

What was so horrendous about them?

They were just kind of goofy little line drawings that looked kind of 1950s. They looked silly; they looked frothy. And that's not to say there's no silliness or frothiness in the piece. But they just kind of pulled it in a direction that it didn't need to go.

What are you working on now?

Trying to answer all my hundreds of emails. I'm taking my column off tomorrow to try and answer them.

Do you have any idea how much nationwide play your column has gotten over these issues, especially since the column isn't syndicated?

Well, only a tiny fraction of the responses to this thing have come from Chicago. The rest have been from ... Oh God, name a place.

Overseas?

Not so much on the CD. When it played in Australia I got a lot of email from Australia. And I think the only other place it's been released is England.

Well that's most of the Anglophone world right there.

That's true. And I got tons from around the world about the column when it first came out.

What's going on with Brenda Starr?

Oh, she chugs along.

You know, I really think you've got a compelling brand here that you're not fully exploiting. The full Mary Schmich story just is not getting out.

Ha ha ha!

Seriously. I mean who was paying attention to Brenda Starr before you scored with Rat Sludge? How many papers does the comic even run in?

I really don't know. I know you don't believe that, but I just think you can not get caught up in how many people read what you do, how much money you're making. I hope to make enough money to lead an OK life.

How long does it take you to write the comic?

It depends. When I get stuck it takes a long time. Other days ... it really depends.

How did you get into the comic-writing business?

I was working as a reporter in Orlando around 1985. Tribune Media Services had moved to Orlando and they were looking for a new writer for the strip, because papers were just dropping the strip by the hundreds.

I remember during the late seventies and early eighties Brenda Starr was really a dinosaur. Although I do remember some big plot where she married the one-eyed man.

That's where the decline really started.

Oh, it was like that TV show The Farmer's Daughter, where everybody lost interest after she got married.

Oh wow. Even I barely remember that.

I don't actually remember it but I remember adults talking about it. It was one of those fading entertainment memories even then.

That's the case with all these old story strips. They all just hang on by their fingernails, and most of them are just dead now.

Yeah, I'm in the Mary Worth fan club and it's really depressing.

Right, it gets harder to find.

Well that's the great thing about the web. You can always find them online, even if they're about two weeks old. Although Mary Worth is so slow that you're still pretty much on time even if you're two weeks late. Speaking of which, what is Brenda's current adventure?

She's involved in investigating the Church of the New Milliennium, which is run by this woman named Karma and an invisible guy named Y, and there's a sexy young apprentice named Max Rapture. Brenda's trying to figure it all out.

Is "Y" based on Do and Ti, the leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult?

No, I hadn't even thought of that. The Y came from Y2K.

I've been wondering about one of the Brenda Starr characters most of my life. This "Hank" person who wears the pillbox hat in Brenda's newsroom - is this person a man or a woman? I know Hank's character predates your tenure at the helm of Brenda Starr, but I'm figuring you must know.

First let me say that I inherited Hank from Brenda's creator. I was interested to learn that many people have had the same question you do. It's always been clear to me that Hank is a woman, though as the years have passed and more people have posed this question, I've come to see that Hank is, shall we say, sexually ambiguous. I like this about Hank because sexual ambiguity is very in vogue right now and anything that lends a modern touch to this outdated strip is good. How's what for an answer?

Can you give me a hint as to what your next coup will be?

I don't know. I'll wait for you to call me and let me know.

I appreciate you're taking the time to talk. I know you're getting a lot of press inquiries.

Well, yours was kind of amusing.