This...this comic is excellent. I approve of this comic.

Thank you, me.

This is one of the first strips I wrote for this storyline, unsurprisingly. In a way, all of Narbonic had been leading up to the not particularly shocking revelation that, as much as Helen loves Dave, she loves him even more when he's totally raving bonkers. I had to cut a fair amount of his speech down to fit into the strip, but I hope the raw sexual magnetism comes across.

As much as I like this strip in general, I was always kind of happiest with the little throwaway bit of Dave snapping his virtual fingers to fix his avatar. That's very cool, Dave.

The glasses on Dave's hologram have one shattered lens and one transparent lens. He's still in the early transitional phase of madness.

Sometimes the need to bring characters up to speed on events dovetails perfectly with the need to say "goink" as often as possible. Also, with a lot of strips featuring Madblood, the actual joke often ends up being less satisfying than coming up with the properly flamboyant way for Madblood to phrase things.

Mell's face came out perfectly in the third panel. It's so rare and precious when that happens.

This is another of the strips Narbonic has kind of been building up to, although I wrote this one a little later. Getting all the dialogue into the last panel was hard. I got better at this over time, but it's still a little cramped here.

So of course Dave is quoting Helen in the future, thereby setting up a paradox where Helen quotes Dave, inspiring Dave to quote Helen, inspiring Helen to quote Dave, etc. But it's also, for no particular reason, a quote from The Iron Giant, including the layout of the second panel. I don't know why. I was just thinking of The Iron Giant.

The punchline is no good, but I didn't want to end without a punchline. Very few strips merit that.

Drawing sound effects is fun.

Around this time I was making an effort to draw people from different angles, so please enjoy the backs of Madblood's and Dave's heads. I draw layouts like this in Skin Horse a lot nowadays.