#16: Rated X for Xenophile, Part I

RealityJockey on Jan. 11, 2025

I am so very chuffed to come back to this thing after too many months to find that I've still got a few folks staying tuned after all this time. I've had a Feature, which I didn't even really know was a thing!

And earlier this week, I was completely flattered to find that Gunwallace, one of The Duck's resident writer/artist/composer/polymaths, has provided a nifty piece of theme music inspired by Alfie's World to The QuackCast,the official podcast for The Duck.

You can hear it for yourself at the 4:34 mark of Quackcast 721, but I encourage you to check out the whole podcast. There's lots of wonderful Tolkien-related content that follows my,

This is deeply flattering and a bit baffling. I don't know that I've done much to deserve this honour, and i'm trying to determine how the strip inspired a piece of shimmying and shimmering “electronica salsa” that I'll certainly be drawing and Photoshopping to the next time I put a strip together.

My best guess is that the sudden sci-fi change of The Traveler channels the electronica, and perhaps the salsa element channels the the journey across early Spain that lives in Alfie's subconscious through the collective memory of all domestic cats. He mentions it back in Strip #7, and it'll certainly come back someday.

All this attention makes me feel a little bit guilty about George R.R. Martining the four or five dedicated readers who are still here in spite of it all. I could have worked on this one a bit longer, but you've been waiting long enough, so here's a strip that's sort of about waiting for things and the long passage of time.

I also found it funny that I've earned an M rating from somewhere—not that I disagree with it. I guess the Traveler does spend a lot of his time in the alien-nude, and so does Alfie… both asexually, I think, but there was that far-too-steamy poster from “Zardoz 2” farther back.

Either way, I think the Mature rating is now appropriate, as we're steering this week into the contents of Kat's closet in a way you might never have wanted to know. The title's a bit of a misnomer; we're not skewing “Full X,” but I have freedom to do something I was secretly hoping to do, which is drop some of the worst and cringiest sci-fi puns I have on record in the next strip.

Stay tuned, and rock out to the officially-approved Alfie's World theme on the latest episaode of the Quackcast, and brace yourselves… my New Year's Resolution is to actually change my shirt some time in 2025!