page 1191 – A Master of Stealth
Insert joke about Avi not needing other people’s help in getting people to turn against him HERE.
Well, at long last, I’ve FINALLY got a new TWC Voting Incentive to go up with this page! We’re back to normal! Now, let’s see how long I can go before something slips up… which isn’t just idle self-deprecation, by the way. I’m also finally working on a set of new (actually real) Conventional Wisdom comics again, so that COULD easily throw off the whole workflow over the next several weeks if I’m not careful. We’ll see what happens.
Incidentally, the layout of the final page is actually the exact opposite of what I had in mind when I drew up the art. That first panel with the hug was supposed to be the whole top of the page, with the other two panels down beneath it. As it happens, though, I botched the size of the drawings (since I draw each panel separately) and they didn’t actually fit as intended… which was probably for the best, as I discovered the last panel really needed more room anyway for the “Mariska’s out in the hall” gag to be clearer. Always nice when I can find a way to spin a complete screw-up into something I totally should have been doing in the first place. That’s, like, how half of all plans actually work.
Oh, and here’s some fun homework: the vending machines in the background are all copy/pasted from previous pages. An imaginary cookie for anybody who can figure out which pages the were!
I feel like this page stretches the meaning of the “hugs” tag.
You’re not wrong
Marshall is getting a hug in the first panel. Sure, it’s an angry hug of reluctant sucking up to the pretty girl, but it’s still Avi wrapping his arms around Marshall’s body in what technically counts as a hug.
I started to make a joke about Hug Theory and the importance of the participants’ motivations and intentions, but now I’m distracted by the fat that I can totally see that being a real thing in the Far Out There universe. Somebody’s totally got a PhD in Hugology.
Hugology (Hug Theory) sounds like something that the Squishyfupplebutter’s would 100% have as a mandatory subject for university. It would be their equivalent of the mandatory Ethics class, and, like Ethics, have people wholly dedicated to researching it, with the main thing they releasing ending up being only of interest or relevance to others researching the subject.
Alternatively, I can see the Squishyfupplebutter’s making hugs into the local equivalent of a death-sport. Maybe a Social-Death Sport. Maybe both a Sport and a mandatory College/University subject, but probably not.
Probably involving some sort of power-armor to provide greater hugging force.