#170: "Relax, Bob"

Arthur Trope Presents: The Inscrutables

No. 170

“Relax, Bob”

Artie and I hopped on a Harbour Air seaplane & flew up to Vancouver a few weeks ago to visit the aquarium in Stanley Park. This is Artie’s creative process. He just wanders around an aquarium until something pops into his head and he sketches and scribbles on the little notepad he keeps tucked in his back pocket. He probably had twenty ideas, ten or twelve good ones, by the time we left. He stared at Schoona the sea turtle so long, I thought they were having a mind meld. I suspect we’ll see turtles soon. The sketches come quickly, but the captions don’t come for weeks sometimes. And then, of course, they take their chances in the Committee reviews. This one came yesterday. Artie’s been doing character studies for ‘Ms. Fourth of July’. Now that he’s basing her on Syd, things are moving quickly. Syd’s prone to panic attacks, and anxiety in general. If you have any experience w this, it’s no fun. Artie sees an opportunity to de-stigmatize these things a little by leaning into them as character traits in a superhero franchise, which I applaud. He’s now calling it “M4J”, btw. So that’s what led to this caption, 3 weeks later, if you follow. Inky cleaned it up remotely from wherever he is, I’m still guessing NY, and the S-MCSS gave the edge to the inked version, which is good news for him, but again the scores were identical bw the old and new algorithms. Which is not great news for Slothrop. Slater & Miyazaki are somewhere rolling their eyes right now. The Committee was mostly out of the office on a sunny Friday afternoon (P.O.E.T.’s Day, as they say in the London office), so this one was approved by Krenshaw with just a thumbs up while he was on a conference call with someone at HQ, probably sounding out his next rotation back in NY. I dropped a couple videos of the trip in the blog, if you’re interested. -Ed.