Gah! How depressing is THAT?!!

And here’s where I began the FINAL ADVENTURE in earnest, to wrap up the strip (with many months still to go)

This is how I feel every day when I check the mailbox. The hopefulness, the elation, the disappointment.

But it’s worth it for the few days of the year there’s a real letter.

Sometimes the “throwaway gag” is the funniest. “Have you thought about renting her out for factory work” is a good contender (although I like the actual punchline here too).

There is perhaps an inconsistency here, in that Vachel points out that they don’t have a fridge (the blog originally erroneously read, “friday” instead of “fridge,” if you’re wondering about the posts below), and later we see them having a fridge. This happened because my vision of their world changed (I originally pictured them living a bit more primitively), but I never went back in and “corrected” it because I like that the strip developed, and I can totally justify it by telling you that they bought a fridge that week in order to put the drawing on it.

Ted has little humility, I think. It’s not that he doesn’t see Vachel’s sarcasm, he’s just not very interested in it, and will take an idea if it has merit. I like Ted.

This will also be the first of several messages in a bottle, which is such an endearing kid notion.