#251: Your Mother's Nucleotides

Artie’s been struggling with a case of writer’s block on the Miss Fourth of July manuscript. After the Bollywood deal fell apart over creative differences (mainly the Bollywood producer’s intention to move the setting from Ashtabula, OH to Puri, India & change the backstory from the time-traveling female protagonist who owes her superhero powers to a paper cut from a radioactive calendar into a song&dance take on the celebration of Ratha Yatra, the Chariot Festival of Lord Jangannath, which kicks off in early July), there was some interest from Inky’s old Marvel contacts, but that didn’t go anywhere, and the meeting with the former Studio Ghibli team sounded promising & they said they’d get back to us if Artie could tweak the 10-page treatment based on their suggestions and turn it into a full-blown screenplay, but they’re struggling to get funding & Artie’s been staring at blank pages for a while without great progress. So now it’s the 5th of July, which has created a sense of urgency & motivation & he’s looking forward to this long weekend to just lock himself in a room and bang the thing out. Needless to say, he’s been distracted by his day job, which requires daily submissions for the Committee to ruin & then publish under his name anyway, but bless him, he keeps at it. Speaking of, this submission came in with a caption that was just a series of alternating A-T, C-G base pairs, which I think was inspired by the binary caption in #249 (“Cody & Ada” the anthropomorphic algorithms) that was then translated to legible text in the accompanying panel. You can’t really translate nucleotide base pairs into legible caption text like you can with binary, which I guess is part of the joke, but it was too much for the Committee who threw it out. So it goes. -Ed.