This was a tortured comic to get out. It spent a month penciled on my desk, then a month inked on my desk. I don’t know why it took so long. No step took much time, it just got shelved for so many other projects. Still, I should have been able to knock it out.

Well, whatever. It’s here now. Enjoy!

Hope your stockings are hung by the chimney with care.

I like this deputy.

If you think the second panel’s not finished, well, it wasn’t. I had to get this strip off my desk, so it went as-is. Things I would have finished are the room and I would have tweaked the characters a bit more. But, that’s pretty much always the case. I hit a point where I have to move forward. This is one of the strips where the break is relatively evident, but I always want to go further. I think if I didn’t set aside a certain amount of time for each step a comic could go on forever. In general, though, I try to spread my time better amongst the tasks to keep the seams a little neater.

Of course there’s a “system”, because it drags people into it! I was digging through my notes on my desk, and saw a good, short story that I can run through that is relatively unencumbered. Just a few quick gags with no heavy character growth.

I had originally planned to have a server rack in the last panel, and had written it various ways, but I found it visually distracting in the thumbnails and it put too much importance on something I wasn’t really planning on revisiting. So, I tweaked it to be just another conspiracy theory.

And this wraps up the BiteyFish storyline. Just about everyone got a piece of the action in this one, which is pretty satisfying. It took forever to finish, but you can’t win them all.

Middle management is not a fate I would wish on anyone, but if there’s a character capable of bending the world to her will it’s Mary. Well, the female lead does a pretty good job at it, too, but she was already there five years ago. That story happened before the strip ever started.

I have a few stories I want to fire off in rapid succession, but I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do it yet. I’ll have to figure it out soon, though, because I don’t want to waste time on interstitials if I can avoid it. I enjoy doing them, but I want to keep the head of steam rolling for a while longer. All I can promise is that there will be more comics.

The surest rumors are the ones management denies the most. You could take that to the bank, if the bank dealt in rumors. So, really, you could take that to Wall Street. I think it’d be called insider trading.

I wanted to use the word defenestrate, because how often do you get the opportunity? But I wanted shareholders and board members throwing themselves out of windows, not being thrown. It’s not a malevolent, murderous thing. Autodefenestration showed up as recent slang in Merriam-Webster. Slang doesn’t excite me, because often it’s not necessary. It’s color. But autodefenestration satisfies my desire to use existing words coupled with well-known affixes. It does dampen the meaning a bit, but how much time can you spend honestly considering a word? I guess if you’re a writer, a long time. But I have a hard enough time keeping comics rolling, so I have to just trust my gut and analyze it to death later in the commentary.

Also, I’m not normally one to make fun of suicide, but the imagery was too much to pass up. Plus, severe injury is the minimum you should expect from defenestration of any kind. So, in for a penny, in for a pound.

This story will wrap up around comic 400. I cut some things, but I may add a few back. Who knows after that! It’s madness, I tell you! MADNESS!

Ted looks confused as to what’s happening here. I think I am, too. It looks like the Lobster can be a good guy when he wants to, but don’t be confused: he hasn’t forgotten his grudge. He’s working behind the scenes so far for both Mary and the main character, so it’s safe to say he’s pretty well integrated into the family at this point.

I’m not sure the disguise is fooling Ted, though.

This comic took me a bit of time to clean up. There’s a fair amount of corrective fluid and some stray marks on the original. It’s a very interesting original from a process perspective. Lots to compare.

Here, the MC finally gets it. Appearances never fooled his boss. This is the first time he’s confronted Ted without a tie on, and finally it’s sunk in. We’ll see if the MC can finally get his act together, though, and grow up. If so, most of that can be glossed over.  Acting like an adult is boring, soul-crushing work and not worthy of comic space.