Norman Drabble hasn’t aged much over the years but “Drabble,” the comic strip that bears his name, turns 40 today — not that Kevin Fagan planned to make any fuss about it.

“Drabble” emerged from the comics Fagan had been drawing since Saddleback College. Instead of a long-haired hippie in sandals, the character got cleaned up a little, ...

“Drabble,” which Fagan sold to United Features Syndicate when he was a 21-year-old college student at Sacramento State, is a comic strip inspired by the shy, ...

When Drabble was new the tabloid pages of the Sun-Times were 14.5 inches long; today they are 11. Papers everywhere have shrunk their borders to save on newsprint costs—the Tribune is narrower ...

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land.” In “The Pattern in the Carpet,” Margaret Drabble uses the jigsaw puzzle, its history and its ...

Drabble, 70, best known for her novels, says she's giving up fiction to avoid repeating herself. She undertook a history of jigsaw puzzles to counter depression.

Margaret Drabble was named a dame of the British Empire in 2008 for her contribution to contemporary English literature. Her 17 novels have mirrored the changing lives of women over the past 50 years.