Peter Sinclair sits in his basement office, flanked by the two crucial elements of his trade. On one side is a drawing table with its clutter of papers, a finely tipped brush, and an open bottle of ink. They are the tools of a cartoonist, the kind that have been used for as long as people have been drawing cartoons.

Along the opposite wall is a high-speed computer with a scanner and electronic drawing pad. Without it--and the Web access it provides--Sinclair's cartoon strip might have died a quiet death following its brief syndication in the mainstream press nearly a decade ago.

But the "100 percent natural, holistic, organic" strip called Alex's Restaurant didn't die. Technology, and Sinclair's persistent belief that his strip sheds comic light on a profound cultural shift, kept it alive.

The son of political activists, Sinclair grew up in Midland, Michigan, about 130 miles north of Detroit. Now 46, he lives there still with his wife and two children in a solidly middle-class ranch house featuring a large, well-tended garden--broccoli, squash, tomatoes, a large berry patch.

Downstairs, with the low rumble of clothes tumbling around the dryer providing background noise, Sinclair tells how his passion for drawing collided with economic realities after his college years in Ann Arbor, and how he satisfied himself with submitting political cartoons to the local daily while working as a paramedic. He even considered a job as an editorial cartoonist for a newspaper in upstate New York.

Then the inspiration for Alex's Restaurant hit, and "I decided the real money is in cartoon strips," says Sinclair, laughing.

Alex's Restaurant is a sweet-tempered, middle-American place where the ribbing is good-natured and the humor more subtle than slapstick. Alex and his wife are corporate dropouts with New Age sensibilities. The cast includes a Mohawked Gen-X poet and busboy and a reality-checking redneck who sits at the counter sipping coffee with everyone from a spiritually connected Native American to a Dr. Andrew Weilñlike homeopath.

Sinclair saw the strip as a way to tap into a social trend he noticed sprouting as the Reagan era drew to a close. Demographers call his target audience "cultural creatives," a group that transcends traditional political ideology in favor of a path that embraces spirituality, ecology, and holistic health.

King Features, one of the country's largest syndicators, agreed to pick up the cartoon in 1990, and almost overnight Alex's Restaurant was appearing in 50 daily newspapers. With visions of a six-figure income dangling within reach, Sinclair and his wife, Sandy, a teacher, quit their jobs.