He is risen indeed! I don't have any insight into the true ethical machinery of the universe, but if the things I read as a child were true then they're at once timeless and ineffable but also authored to our precise moment. I remember learning in church that God was a 27 Dimensional Entity, which gave the Sundays thereafter a potent, hard sci-fi kick. If He exists at a remove from causality, well, that explains a lot. I mean, it's no Kolob, but we lowly snake-handlers had to make due with what we had.

Mork was trying to tell me what we can and can't do strips about, and the long and the short of it is that he's wrong. It called to mind the Council of Elrond, where Boromir is just like, "We should obviously use this harmful and wicked thing in the prosecution of our duties." Don't think too hard about everything else that happens in that scene! Or in the rest of that book, or the next one, or the next one, or any of the cartoons and movies. My argument is gonna look super bad if you do look at any of that stuff. Anyway, what I told him is that - in a manner of speaking - his own situation and that powerful series both involve rings of one kind or another. He did not find this funny.

Our little comic strip here has always been a sort of diary for Jerry and I. When this comic strip started I was a 21 year old kid who had just moved out of his parents house and was living with his best friend in Spokane Washington. You saw me propose to my then girlfriend and you were there when my kids were born. I talked with you many times over the years about my struggles with anxiety and you were there when I went on medication. Well I am turning 49 years old this year and if you’ve been reading for a long time you might be around the same age. I’m sorry to say it but we gotta get our buttholes checked out and I am scheduled to have mine done this Wednesday.

It's a meme with a very particular clientele: there is always, always something fucked up with Gabe's setup when he tries to do the Make-A-Strip. During the Surface era, it would reliably try to do a system update as soon as we would start the panel. The setup has coalesced these days around a Framework laptop and the lower tier XPPen Artist Pro, but he forgot his dongle so the puck he brought - the little device he uses to perform the somatic components of the Art spell - was inert. The screen could be manipulated physically, a feature he never even knew about, but when you try to shift the art around on there your work slides around like it's on an air hockey table. It wasn't optimal, but there were dark chuckles and schadenfreudes out there, so it occurred to me: is there a way to leverage even greater torments? We also dish up a truly ancient reference in panel one for all of those newly traveling through the archive.

Mork had saved a whole section of Pokopia - I won't say which one, because I think technically it might be a spoiler - just for the trip. This caused a resumption of those affections which had been felt so keenly before, and I apologize for the character of that sentence but I just watched Pride and Prejudice again. It's gonna fuck up my language for days. In any case: every now and then, in the course of his duties as reclaimer of the Kanto region, he will remember some of the places Pokemon live and feel a way about it. Ivri has an amazing song on this topic.

It’s always something. At PAX East this year I had more time to draw the comic during Make a Strip but I forgot a very important piece of hardware, and not having it made drawing the comic a huge pain in my ass. I normally have a little handheld ”puck” with a bunch of buttons on it that my left hand holds and uses for short cut keys. I forgot the little dongle that makes that thing work so instead I attempted to use my drawing tablets touch controls... for the first time...live on stage. It did not go great but I was told over and over again during the show how much fun it was to watch me struggle. In fact a few people suggested that going forward there should always be some impediment to me drawing the strip at the show!

Gabriel's diet, always a fraught topic, degrades substantially on trips. Once he ate someone who came to the show! He felt bad, but because the attendee had been completely devoured there was no way to truly communicate the fact. Another time, fell upon a ruined pigeon he'd found in the street. Traffic stopped in both directions - sat back on his haunches, he gnawed on that rigid bird like it was corn on the cob. In comparison, this year's food policy was positively enlightened.