I wrote Dave's dialogue in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way. This storyline contains a lot of references to random weird experiments Helen presumably conducts off-panel all the time. I think this is my second favorite one.

And this one is my favorite. Notice that Helen has put on a nice skirt and hose.

Like I said, I kind of decided to do this plot twist at the last minute. Dave's right; it's not really very shocking. I guess it all worked pretty well in the end.

There are lines of Artie's dialogue that delight me more than anything else in Narbonic, and the way he gets sidetracked into a politically-correct semantic argument here is the type of thing I love. He's a very autobiographical character sometimes, at least when he's being all fussy and absurd. Anyway, I like this and tomorrow's strip for being less about the joke-punchline setup and more about the characters just having ridiculous conversations.

Anyway, Artie's last line is what we call foreshadowing. I already had cruel, cruel plans for him.

I really like arguments where both viewpoints are equally out of touch with reality. Must be why I hang out on the Internet so much. Anyway, I'm very happy with Helen's and Dave's parallel monologues here, and pleased that the characters' voices are sufficiently established that you can tell who's speaking even over the phone.

My brother's middle-school science project was teaching a mouse to play soccer. I helped him with it. He built a miniature soccer field with a tiny net at one end, and through positive reinforcement (i.e., food) he taught the mouse to push a Ping-Pong ball from center field to the net. It totally should have won instead of this one kid's birdwatching journal that his mom made anyway.

Quentin Proctor was the name of a character in a novel my brother and I wrote when we were kids. My brother came up with a whole family of characters with Q names.

[SPOILERS] Being able to tell the creations of mad science apart seems to be a common superpower possessed by mad scientists. Helen was always able to distinguish between identical gerbils. The larger question is, why do I like to draw huge groups of identical characters? It gets pretty tedious after the first few strips.

Dave's face looks a lot more expressive and vulnerable without the cigarette. Not that he ever smoked.