Misadventures in confectionery

There’s been a little hiatus on my Illustration-Friday-participation front (for myriad and not-always-especially-interesting reasons), but I couldn’t resist this week’s topic – swell.

The consumption of (or, more accurately, protracted mastication of) anything even resembling bubblegum/chewing gum was strictly prohibited to my little sister and I, on any and all occasions, while we were growing up. Such a joy-sapping embargo (I spent my whole childhood hankering after an illicit Screwball ice-cream…) was imposed, ostensibly, on the basis that we might choke on a disgusting, indigestible glob of the stuff at a moment’s notice, but a further and, I might contest, equally distressing hazard of bubblegum came to light one summer afternoon when I was visited by a particularly sticky case of karmic retribution for disobeying such an earnest parental injunction: it is impossible to extract from a full head of 8-year-old(‘s) hair when the (quite literal) bubble bursts… Hence the look of vague alarm on the featured child’s face:

Abort! Abort!

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