Kismet! The current Skin Horse storyline deals with the organization Artie is on his way to organize in this strip. Yeah, I might as well come out and admit it. They eventually changed to a slightly less ridiculous name.

Mongor appears in a later Narbonic storyline. He's named after my mother's pet iguana. More on that later.

Dave is wearing my favorite T-shirt, the one that says HERE COMES THE HULK on the front and THERE GOES THE HULK on the back. I drew him in that a lot; it's his standard sleep shirt. Helen, meanwhile, is wearing the Official Lab Pajamas from the "Demons" storyline.

I use those yellow legal pads for my Viz work. Also, I like Helen's fuzzy slippers. I hope those are the slippers she was meaning to order to match the official lab pajamas.

Dave is reading Kyle Baker's Plastic Man. That there was a great run of comics.

SPOILERS: Helen is absolutely right: Milo Tinasky is not Dr. Narbon. You can see where she'd be sensitive about Tinasky being compared to her mom, though.

"McBloodhunter" was a name my friend Rob McCarthy (a.k.a. the basis for the Dave Conspiracy guy in the wheelchair and the guy with Andrew in the continuity repair Sunday strips) came up with for a 1990s Rob Liefeld-style superhero. So this is kind of a collaborative effort, but "Dr. McBloodhunter gave me a Zagnut bar!" is one of my favorite lines in the entirety of Narbonic. Thanks, Rob!

Dave's last line was something I often thought about Helen while writing Narbonic. She really could have turned out a lot worse.

Dave is reading the great Roger Langridge's comic Fred the Clown.

Dave's still reading Fred the Clown comics. Incidentally, I enjoy the dynamic of Helen and Dave reading side-by-side in separate beds like a 1950s sitcom married couple, but it did mean having to draw a lot of damn beds. Which means having to draw in perspective and stuff, and is just no fun at all.

I just think capybaras are really cool, is all.

It's awfully bold of Dave to volunteer his girlfriend as a saboteur against her own boss, but I bet she'd do it. Helen mentioned way back in the Moon arc that AIs have a tendency to turn on their creators.

As mentioned earlier this week, M.U.T.T. eventually changed its name to the slightly less embarrassing Transgenic Anti-Defamation League and is currently holding its annual meeting over in Skin Horse. I didn't mean for things to work out this way, but here we are. Um, you probably don't want to read Skin Horse right now if you don't want any Narbonic spoilers. Sorry.

In my daily strips, I try very, very hard to avoid doing strips without gags. It's way too easy to tug the heartstrings that way, and if you go to that well too many times the strip starts turning to melodrama (what Eric Burns of Websnark used to call "First and Ten," back in the day). I did, however, allow myself a few indulgences, and this is one of them. I'm a sucker for romantic angst. And of course I love Dave. Getting to draw his eyes made anything worthwhile.

On a less mushy note, I stupidly drew the fourth panel as-is and then had to cover up the whole area where the thought balloon is in Photoshop to create the third panel. This took forever, but it ended up looking pretty natural. The figures curled up in bed turned out well, too. Good one, me!