Apparently there's a whole zoo date adventure I didn't bother to draw. Good work, me! I remember spending some time figuring out which two animals would be funniest to combine into a monster. And make venomous.

Artie's ultimatum ends up triggering the events of the final year of Narbonic. But that's still a few months away. As I've mentioned before, Artie has perfectly good reasons to be concerned about Dave, but on a subconscious level he's also driven by the fact that Helen and Dave getting it on kind of squicks him out. He does not want to hear about Dave's hot, hot body.

I always liked this strip and was strangely proud of the word balloons in panel 2. Sometimes it doesn't take much to make me happy.

Artie and Helen's feet are really huge in this strip. And yes, my characters tend to all wear the same sneakers.

This is a filler-y plot-advancing strip that doesn't have much of a punchline, but at least we find out that Helen kept the rose Dave gave her on their zoo date. I'm sure you were all holding your breath over that.

SPOILERS: Helen's line in panel three is repeated in the last Narbonic strip, which I'd probably already written at this point.

I wrote this strip very, very early on and waited years for a chance to use it. And here it is! Hooray! It obviously owes a debt to Steve Martin's discovery of his purpose in The Jerk, a movie to which my parents exposed me at an unwisely early age.

No, I have no idea what Artie is examining. It looks like a little bathyscape.

I wrote this one early; not as early as yesterday's strip, but well in advance. Artie almost always uses metric measurements because he thinks he's so smart.

I had reservations about giving Artie his little soul patch, clearly visible in panel 2, but decided that it was an accurate reflection of the amount of evil Artie contains. Total evil, of course, would merit a goatee. Artie has shaved off his soul patch for Skin Horse because I got tired of it. I am unaware of his current level of evil.

The sign in the first panel reads, "Employees Must Irradiate Hands." I used that one a few times.

Of course, most apes are not constantly in heat. Humans are just weird. SEXY weird.

Dave really is annoying when he's getting laid. I mean, look at him, smiling away. You can pick him up and shake him and he doesn't give a crap.

I know I ask this a lot about random things I drew into the backgrounds of strips six years ago, but what's that thing in the first panel? That thing looks awesome.