More practice with pen and ink. I felt this strip deserved it nice doing, as it’s one of my favorite Higgins speeches, and it’s #200 and all. (Whoo.) That’s why I didn’t put up the sketchy-ass version of it I threw together last week. (And that is why we went down to one comic a week. I’d rather do one good one than two phoned-in ones.) In some ways, I think my drawing is technically worse when I’m using real-life ink, but it’s also more charming-looking.

I found the text for this strip in my old notes from April 2007. It was fully-formed pretty much as you see it now at the same time as I was scripting out the Port Side Story comics, that’s how far ahead I was thinking then! Basically, I brainstormed the entire arc from the beginning to one or two storylines from now in about three days. The rest has just been filling in the details.

All right, this is one of the more obscure strip titles: a bad linguistics pun on a line from the not-very-well-known and very threatening “love” song “Ev’rything I’ve Got.”

I’ve a powerful anaesthesia in my fist,
And the perfect wrist to give your neck a twist
There are hammerlock holds, I’ve mastered a few,
And ev’rything I’ve got belongs to you.

One of my favorite false claims about myself is that I have a powerful anaesthesia in my fist.

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