In Media Res (Book 1), Canto II, "Air's Siren Song," Page 6

Bubbles on Jan. 9, 2007

…and we've been guilt-tripped into another update! It'll be slow going for a while; the Artist is still working towards his Master's and I'm working full time, plus studying in the evenings in the hope that the second time is the charm for the bar exam.

So, anyway, enough of our “sad girls in snow” excuses for not having a comic on anything approaching a professional schedule. The comic today ends the current round of Van's teasing of Helen for Helen's professed disinterest in the courtly arts as Van engages in a method of flirting slightly less subtle than the subtlety evidenced by Agent Brown when he (it?) tried to kill Trinity in the phone booth fifteen minutes into the first (and only good) Matrix movie. The boys' names, which you may or may not learn from reading the comic as they are about as important as Clown 1 and Clown 2 in Hamlet (with less exhumation, which I'm sure pleases you as much as it pleases me), are Brett and Arthur.

Yeah, I know, nobody who isn't an anthropomorphic bespectacled rodent names his kid “Arthur,” at least not since the death of Dudley Moore, but the only other name floating around in my head when I wrote this was “Eustace” (I really liked C.S. Lewis's “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” when I was a kid), and that's probably a less likely name for an American child than “Adolph.”

Maybe I'll just assume that the next batch of kids are children of flower children or people who met on Hannidate, so it'll either be “Moonbeam” and “Che” or “Ronald,” “Whittaker,” and “Michelle.”

We are also about to introduce our mascot characters. I'd say more about that, but I'd hate to ruin it. Let me just explain that Helen is from Minnesota.