page 1209 – Cooking Is Dangerous
…now he just sticks to eating apples, like all the time.
I mentioned this in the comments last time, but I cut out Ichabod’s line from the previous page to keep the focus on Layla. Originally I was just gonna squeeze it into a later page… but then I suddenly really wanted to draw the Xafri twins again, and the next thing I knew it’d grown into a full page. Look, I really like all these extra nitpicker characters I came up with, and it really sucks that the plot is in a spot where I can’t use them more!
Also, because I’ve been really bad about posting reminders about this sort of thing: Jenna’s Patreon comic just hit 50 pages!
(EDIT: AWW DANG IT, I forgot to do a new Voting Incentive yesterday… again! Fortunately, I had a special idea held in reserve specifically for the inevitable moment when I’d need to slap an incentive together REALLY quick, so it’s up now. Sorry!)
In Nitpicker flashback, food eats you.
not just nitpicker flashback, that seems to be pretty common in FOT universe in general
in particular, most of the caligiari family’s holiday dinners seem to end up that way
In the future, the food chain is more like a tangled knot.
Blame that on Mad Science/Mad Scientists. We USED to be firmly esconced at the TOP of the food chain darnit! Serves ’em right if their holiday dinners occasionally end with them as dinner!
re: vote incentive – in the tradition that this is the imaginary RL equivalent of a kids saturday morning tv show, the moral of the story ends up being that the true treasure of the big ol bring land was the treasure of the land/nature itself. Alternately, in a more FOT universe sort of “moral” of the story that Layla would likely sympathize with, the true treasure of the big ol boring empty land was that there ended up being boatloads of valuable quantum space oil or some such thing buried underneath it, said treasure of course at the end of the adventure being exploited by quantum strip mining or some such similar thing. Or perhaps the “treasure” turned out to simply be the value of empty land itself, which apparently is in short supply in the distant future, and someone built a huge strip mall on it. That actually does seem like something a nitpicker would point out, as their specialty seems to be pointing out the obvious to those who don’t notice it: Land doesn’t have to have anything on,in, or under it to be very valuable. A valuable economic lesson for you kids out there. Invest in land, they’re not making any more of it. Or something like that.
Yeah, this was a very “Far Out There” sort of writing experience, in that the intended gag was just going to be the drawing of a big empty space. It wasn’t until after I’d written the title that all those extra implications/interpretations/subtexts came to mind.
Most of my best writing happens entirely outside of my own control.
Congratulations! If you do it on purpose, that’s just “Skill” – if you do it without intending to that’s “Genius”. 😀
(*I’ve noticed that “Genius” is frequently very difficult to distinguish from “dumb luck”) 😉