Alumni Gazette

A Seriously ‘Big Question’

Readers of the “Bo Nanas” comic strip might have missed it, but the marriage proposal that took place last summer between two characters in the syndicated strip was more than an inside joke for Jocelyn Swigger ’02E (DMA).

Swigger, who last fall began a faculty appointment at Gettysburg College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, found herself answering the “big question” when her boyfriend, John Kovaleski, the artist behind “Bo Nanas,” used the July 6 installment to ask her to marry him.

To keep his intentions secret, Kovaleski pretended that his editor at the Washington Post Writers Group, which distributes the strip, found a typo in one of the panels and Kovaleski needed Swigger to read the installment online at Comics.com.

At the computer, Kovaleski kneeled next to Swigger while she navigated to the site, where she saw the cartoon versions of her and Kovaleski that sometime appear in the strip. On the screen, Kovaleski’s character was also kneeling while he asked, “Will you marry me?”

“When I saw that, we both started crying, I think,” Swigger says.

The answer was, “Yes.”