Drawing On Life : They’re goofballs. But they’re lovable goofballs--and after 16 years, cartoonist Kevin Fagan still gets a charge out of the ‘Drabble’ family.

Some days, ideas for Kevin Fagan’s syndicated cartoon strip “Drabble” flow like spilled ink.

Other times, it seems the ink well has run dry.

“I went to my dentist, and I was talking to him about it,” Fagan says. “He said, ‘What are you working on this week?’ I said, ‘I have no idea. I just have no idea at all.’ ”

Fagan was still waiting for inspiration to strike later in the day when he left for a doctor’s appointment. Taking a seat in the waiting room, he waited. And waited. As the minutes turned into more than an hour, he picked up the spiral note pad he uses to jot down ideas.

“I just started writing down ideas about what it’s like to be sitting in a waiting room waiting for doctors,” he says. “By the time I left, I had my week’s worth of cartoons.”

No one told Fagan it would be easy being funny. Not on a daily basis, turning out a cartoon strip that appears in more than 200 newspapers--including The Times--365 days a year.

But after 16 years, the cartoonist still gets a charge when inspiration strikes and he can breathe three-dimensional life into his two-dimensional drawings of the Drabble family: father and mother Ralph and June (better known as “Honeybunch”), brothers Norman and Patrick, and baby sister Penny.

“When I get a really good story line,” Fagan says, “it’s almost euphoric, and I can’t wait to run out to the drawing board and start putting it down.”

When “Drabble” debuted in the spring of 1979, the then 22-year-old Fagan was billed as the youngest syndicated cartoonist in America. At the time, he identified most with his main character, Norman: a shy, insecure and occasionally bumbling college student who lives at home. Fagan calls Norman “a dork,” not unlike himself at that age: “The girl that Norman hangs out with, Wendy, is kind of based on a couple of girls I knew in college who would never give me the time of day.”

Fagan, now 39, has been married for eight years, has three young children and lives in a two-story tract house in one of the newer sections of Mission Viejo.

And as middle age creeps up on him like a pair of baggy boxer shorts, Fagan finds himself identifying less with Norman and more with Norman’s dad, Ralph: a paunchy mall security guard who is given to loud floral sport shirts and silent Oliver Hardy glares; after Norman does something particularly stupid, a frustrated Ralph looks out at the reader as if to say, “Can you believe what I have to put up with?”

The doughnut-loving mall cop, in fact, has become Fagan’s favorite character. “Ralph’s kind of taken over the strip, kind of like the way Snoopy took over ‘Peanuts,’ ” he says. “Now it’s pretty much about Ralph and Ralph’s life. Not that Norman’s gone, but Ralph has emerged as the funniest character.”

Unlike Norman, who knows he’s a goofball, Fagan says that Ralph doesn’t know he’s a goofball--and that makes him all the funnier.

Over the years, four collections of Fagan’s cartoon strips have been published in paperback, and “Drabble” has carried on a flirtatious relationship with Hollywood: Director Ron Howard toyed with executive-producing a live-action TV version of the strip in the early ‘80s, and animator Bill Melendez, who produced and directed the “Peanuts” TV cartoon specials, has test-animated “Drabble” and, Fagan says, is now shopping the project around to the networks.

“Drabble” also recently joined other United Media syndicate strips on the Internet, and Fagan has signed a deal for a series of “Drabble” greeting cards.

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The adventures--and misadventures--of the Drabbles come together in Fagan’s studio: a remodeled section of his oversized garage. The walls are covered with framed and autographed cartoon originals, gifts from fellow funny-page artists. There’s Jim Davis’ “Garfield,” Bil Keane’s “The Family Circus,” Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or for Worse,” Mort Walker’s “Beetle Bailey” and nearly two dozen more.

There’s also a strip autographed by “Sparky,” as “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz is known to his friends.

Fagan met Schulz in 1985 and has visited the cartoon superstar’s studio in Santa Rosa. Schulz owns an ice-skating rink there, and the Fagans have made it a family ritual to attend the ice show Schulz produces every year. One year, after Fagan’s wife, Cristi, admired the carousel horses used in the production, Schulz had one sent to the couple. It’s now displayed in their living room.

Schulz, who says he enjoys spending time with the Fagans, is a big fan of “Drabble.”

“I think it is consistently one of the funniest strips around,” he says. “One of the reasons for its success . . . is it’s original in its approach. . . . The humor is never nasty. They are all good people, and I think this is very important these days.”

Fagan was a history major at Cal State Sacramento in the late ‘70s when he wrote to Schulz seeking advice on how to get his cartoon syndicated. He had contributed cartoons to the student newspaper at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo and drew for the university paper.

Schulz doesn’t remember receiving Fagan’s letter, but Fagan memorized Schulz’s response, a handwritten message on Snoopy stationery: “I hesitate to comment on art which is sent to me because it’s not me that you have to impress. It’s an editor somewhere.”

These days, Fagan receives his own fan mail--not only from fledgling cartoonists seeking advice but also from mall security guards who view Ralph Drabble as one of their own. Fagan has even been made an honorary mall cop in Houston. Which means, he jokes, “If I ever go to Houston, I can make arrests.”

Fagan says coming up with humorous ideas--a process that finds him jotting down thoughts throughout the day, even on paper towels--is the hardest part of his job. To help things along, he leaves the house.

During the school year, he takes his 7-year-old son, Sean, to school and then stops by McDonald’s or the library for about an hour. There, he sits, note pad at the ready, and “lets my mind wander.” Other times, he drives to nearby Rancho Santa Margarita, churning ideas during the 10-minute drive over and during a walk around the lake there.

Returning to his drawing board, he spends about two hours drawing and lettering the daily strip and nearly a day doing the longer Sunday strips.

With Sean, 6-year-old Kelsey and 4-year-old Brian at home, Fagan says, summers are especially chaotic. Not that he complains when the kids come into his studio to talk or ask a question. “He just puts his pen down and listens,” says Cristi Fagan, a former dairy company sales rep who met Kevin on the exercise bicycles at a gym in 1984. Unlike some “jerks” who hang out trying to pick up women, she says, “he looked safe.” He asked her out the second time he saw her.

Being married to a cartoonist sets her apart from other wives, Cristi says. “Everyone else’s husband goes off to work, but it’s almost like I have four kids because I have everyone home all the time,” she says. “If [we’re] doing something really fun, he oftentimes puts his work down and comes along, which is great for the kids--and me.”

Also, she adds, “Things are pretty funny around here. [Kevin] can turn anything around and make it light. He just looks at life differently. Things aren’t as catastrophic for him.”

Still, the kids think their Uncle Tim, Kevin’s extroverted older brother, is the funniest member of the family. “Uncle Tim could be a stand-up comic,” Cristi says. “I say, ‘But Daddy’s funny.’ They just look at me.”

Among the four Fagan brothers, Tim, at 48, is the closest in age to Kevin, and while growing up they spent a lot of time together.

“I had to give up a promising baseball career to baby-sit Kevin,” jokes Tim Fagan, a general manager for an electronics company in Ontario. “I guess I might have had something to do with his unique spin on life. Kevin is my best friend, and he’s basically everything I’m not: He’s level-headed, compassionate, sensitive and conservative with money. But the one thing we do have in common is the sense of humor, and it is uncanny how we can both look at the same difficult situation and see the same humor in it.”

Sometimes, Tim drops by his brother’s house to role-play: He does the character Ralph and Kevin plays Norman, and out of that, Tim says, “ideas will evolve.”

Cristi has also been a catalyst for the strip. As she puts it: “Whenever I say something dumb, he really appreciates it.”

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Seated at a table in the family room, thumbing through a collection of early strips, Fagan thinks back to “Drabble’s” debut in 1979.

“Yuck,” he says. “I don’t know how anybody liked it back then. I can’t bear to look at my stuff from five years ago, much less 16. The drawing was really bad. The humor was pretty good--I got off a few good jokes every now and then--but I don’t know if I was very consistent back then.”

Despite his success, Fagan retains a Norman-like sense of insecurity. On Mondays, he says, “I always open the paper real slowly to see if I’m still there and make sure I haven’t been replaced by something.”

It is, he acknowledges, a challenge for any cartoonist to maintain his plot of real estate on the comic strip pages.

“There are always new strips coming out, and for an editor to add a new strip, he’s got to replace somebody, and that’s the scary part of it,” Fagan says. “That threat is always hanging over your head, and that’s why you can never let down.

“Any time I start feeling complacent that’s when I think, ‘Man, I’ve got to come up with a real good story line, something really imaginative.’ I don’t want to do the same thing over and over.”

Earlier this year, he took time away from his work to manage his son’s Little League team. While it sometimes left him hard-pressed to meet his deadlines, being away from the drawing board had its rewards: Little League provided a batch of ideas that he plans to use when baseball season arrives this spring.

Will Norman be the manager?

“I haven’t decided,” Fagan says. “I don’t know if it will be Norman or Ralph, both of whom would bring a different slant to it.”

Maybe Norman and Ralph could be competing managers?

If Fagan were a cartoon character, this is where a light bulb would appear above his head.

“Hey, now there you go!” he says. “That’s a good idea.”

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Kevin Fagan

Age: 39.

Background: Born in Los Angeles; now lives in Mission Viejo.

Family: He and wife Cristi have three children, ages 3 to 7.

Passions: “I guess I’m just a full-time dad. I’m either drawing cartoons or doing something with my kids.”

On the demands of drawing a daily cartoon strip: “I feel burned out all the time . . . but then something happens to recharge you. It’s like being a shortstop for the Yankees or the Dodgers and saying, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ There are so many people that would trade places with you. I think all the time about how lucky I am to be doing this.”

On budding cartoonists who ask for advice: “I don’t advise them on their artwork or anything like that. But if they’re young and in school, I say, ‘Study hard.’ If a cartoonist doesn’t know anything about anything, he or she’s not going to have anything to write about. So the more subjects you’re familiar with, the more ideas you’ll have. And I tell them draw for your school paper and just get the experience of doing it, working on your deadlines.”