Britt is a constant in Robert’s “School Log,” a handwritten and illustrated diary of each school day of the eighth grade. It is drawn in a style somewhere between Walt Kelly and Carl Barks. His comics are already well composed and paced, and he is his own best character, with Britt making frequent appearances. Robert reads as stubbornly independent, interested only in the judgments of his older brother Charles, God, and his own conscience: he refuses to say the Our Father at school because it’s the Protestant version and decides instead to say it to himself; he is skeptical of a teacher’s lecture on the dangers of horror comic books.
He also began experiencing the first surges of puberty. Of prime interest was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle- a dominant female adventurer modeled after Tarzan and played by Irish McCalla in a hokey television show. He would imagine himself on Sheena’s back as she swung on the jungle vines, carried away from his agony. As he fixated on strong women, he focused on the lower body: large buttocks and powerful legs. He had begun staring at women’s legs when he was just four years old accompanying Bea on a downtown shopping trips and, from a child’s point of view, focusing on the forms in his direct sight line: women’s legs in nylons with a seam tracing the curves of the calves.
Every leg, especially in those 1940s high-heeled, round-toed shoes, loudly clacking on the pavement, enthralled him. They became the dominant shapes in his field of vision, shapes he wanted to grasp and explore. His female classmates also tantalized him. And it wasn’t just silent flirtation in the classroom. Robert has always been obsessed with displays of physical strength and flexibility—the ultimate counterpoint to his own sense of himself as a brain in a jar, a male incapable of expressing twentieth-century ideals of masculinity, forever rejected by the girls and women he sought. Jeanette Betts sat behind Robert in his American history class. She would place her leg on his seat and Robert would gently pet it. Dolly Hensley sat to his right and he mingled his foot with hers.
Decades later Robert wrote about the erotic charge of his "leg contact" with of of these girls: "Nancy Knicely sat behind me in Mr. Ely's English class—sometimes I would stretch back & sit on her knees when she pressed up against the back of my chair. She had long, shapely legs. Once I turned around & looked at her & she said, ‘get off my knees’ in a husky, low voice, meanwhile not moving her legs at all.” Like his teeth-shattering martyrdom in Don’t Tempt Fate, these moments are recounted in his 1988 comic Footsy. Rendered in thick, lush brushstrokes that radiate adolescent sweat, the story details the beginnings of Robert’s long-standing sexual fixations.