Seriously, why didn't I just write "Cal" on Caliban's name tag? That said, this is an excellent strip.

So this week represents a rare appearance of Mell out of uniform. I always put Caliban in these hipster button-down shirts. He's the only character in Narbonic with any kind of fashion sense.

My backgrounds in yesterday's strip were pretty good, but in this strip I kind of gave up and just drew, like, half a fence. Drawing is hard.

Any strip where Mell describes events, from her very special point of view, still has the power to crack me up a little.

This is a silly strip. I just wrote it to fill out the week. Sorry, everyone. I do like the idea of Satan sitting around sulking between evil schemes, though. So there's that.

This whole week of strips was T Campbell's idea. Much earlier in this storyline, he emailed me to say that he felt I hadn't done enough to develop the idea that Helen would be unstable (well, more so than usual) without Dave around, and I needed to dramatize it instead of just having Mell talk about it. He was right! Hence this week.

Also, I drew a great pile of...stuff. Whatever that is that Helen's tearing apart.

The flying pickle people aren't a reference to anything in particular, but they kind of recall the potato people Rimmer rambles about in the episode of "Red Dwarf" where he goes insane and starts wearing a gingham dress and a penguin puppet. That is an excellent episode.

On the night of my first date with Andrew, when he was waiting at a curb for me to show up, a man with a parrot on his shoulder walked up to him and asked him if he knew any good bars. Ever since then, Andrew has wondered how his life would have gone if he'd gone off with that guy instead of waiting for me. This strip is a tribute to the life Andrew never led.

The other good thing about doing this week of strips is that I was able to end it with Helen and Mell rededicating themselves to evil. They needed to get pumped up for the rapidly-approaching dénouement.

The Tick: "This is what we call the dénouement. That's French for 'when we beat up the supervillain.'"