#181: Inky & Stan
Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutables
No. 181
“Inky & Stan”
Artie’s decided to play hardball with the Bollywood folks. It’s not clear how much leverage he has, but he’s assuming they really want to close, bc he’s insisting they bundle in an animated feature of Asparagus (“Gus”) the Cat, and make it a 2-picture deal. He’s prepared to blow the whole thing up over it. Foolish or shrewd? Artie says the key to any negotiation is being willing to walk away, so I guess we’ll see who walks. Stan doesn’t like Artie’s position bc he thinks Gus has more potential in LA as a live-action film w some CGI thrown in. I don’t see it myself, but Stan’s been doing this a while, so he must know something we don’t. And speaking of negotiations, it turns out Hanelore didn’t actually accept the full-time role. She has a list of requirements before she formally accepts. Which feels kind of ballsy for an intern who was just offered a gig with the benefits SynrSys offers, but I have to say I respect it. I definitely didn’t negotiate when I got hired. Not sure what leverage she thinks she has, but she did fix the S-MCSS model with her C++ & JavaScript updates (maybe), & probably saved us $1M by calling out that we could just use Google for free instead of paying McKinsey another pile in fees to develop the Intellectual Property Violation Detection System. So I guess her internship resume doesn’t look too shabby. But still. I suppose it’s up to me to do the negotiating & I’m not remotely qualified, so that may be her ace in the hole. We’ll see who’s willing to walk there too. Anyway, here’s 181, based on a game Inky made up where we race swivel chairs around the office w our CalfKing2’s strapped to our legs. Artie already had a usable sketch in his Moleskin from the Vancouver Aquarium trip. Inky is apparently the 3rd most popular name for an octopus after Bubbles & Ceph, so it works. Stan isn’t on the list. But it did OK in the focus groups after the Committee cut 22 words of extended backstory out of the caption, & finally got their heads around the math that comes out to fifteen legs and not 7 as Kreshaw briefly argued, or 14 which was Patel’s response. -Ed.
