My guess was always that a book club was as good a way as any to meet somebody if you were school-age? I mean, crushes happen every twenty minutes in some situations, so why not the girl in book club? So, like “I’ll see you at book club?” And maybe the quiet atmosphere and presumed low turnout would lead to an opportunity for smooching? So the similar but slightly more suggestive, “I’ll see you at book club?”

The characters just kind of naturally fell the way they did because I felt the group of six worked pretty well. Everybody had enough people to interact with, the genders weren’t underrepresented too badly, and everybody had room for different kinds of relationships (by which I mean character X can be closer to characters Y and Z than they are to character N). It was far after the fact when I realized I’d accidentally done something that mimicked the gender balance of the TV show “Friends”.

I was super shy in high school, so I really didn’t have many friends who were girls. The grouping of characters in the strip is probably more similar to the circle(s) of friends I developed in college (which is/are still largely intact, oddly enough), although not too consciously.

In reality, I’d suspect that either characters like Courtney and Mac have had a long-going close-enough-to-eat-together friendship or she secretly has a crush on him. Or she’s just super friendly and outgoing.