#172: "Huh"

Two pieces of good news to report this morning. First, the results from #168 (“Tell Me You’re Messing With Me”, w the 2 astronauts locked out of the ship) are in. We’ve been getting a ton of traffic from India since Artie was in Mumbai in Dec studying ancient Vedic comics & doing lectures. Across the global network, it passed 1M engagements, which triggered some automatic deals with the licensors in Hong Kong & Mexico City. It came within a hair of surpassing No. 97 (“Still Life With Cats”) for the post-SynrSys acquisition record based on total eyeballs. So thanks for that. The Committee decided that the world obviously wants more astronaut jokes, so more astronaut jokes they shall get. Artie pulled out the old Moleskin to see what he could dust off, which wasn’t difficult bc we’d been on an outing to the UW Planetarium in Jan. Artie gets after-hours access there bc he teaches a summer semester class called ‘Archetypical Patterns in Single Panel Comics, 1914-1946’. Which is how he met Syd, fyi. So he already had some ideas roughed out and turned this one in pronto. But then we went through the whole long caption vs short caption thing again. Artie submitted version 2 above & named the astronaut after me for fun. Although he said it was true that I have no idea how much of my life is a lie and it didn’t feel like he was joking. Slothrop had insisted that the S-MCSS2 include a new variable for concision, which pretty much put the kibosh on the long caption, so shorter ideas were kicked around. Hanelore of all people, suggested compressing everything in the long caption nearly into the single word, “Huh”, which immediately clicked with Slothrop and Krenshaw and they pushed it through. I posted both. (Swipe right to compare.) I prefer the long one this time, but maybe only bc the guy’s named Ed. Hanelore did get a lot into that one word, tho. Oh, & the 2nd piece of good news is no one has even mentioned the St. Paddy’s Day thing yet. I’m not going to bring it up. -Ed.