With the second Sunday strip, I think I graduated from mostly crayons to mostly colored pencils. We’re making progress here.

When I launched Narbonic, I advertised it by emailing about two dozen friends and posting to the Usenet group rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, where I was a regular. By the time of this strip, I had advanced beyond a readership made entirely of my friends, and had acquired a few readers who were friends of friends. Chris Ellmann, whose name is cruelly misspelled here, was one of these. Soon after this, Chris found his niche in Narbonic fandom by writing to me whenever I put nearly-illegible tiny print into the backgrounds of strips. I continued to receive emails on this subject for the rest of the strip’s run.

Leah Smith is a college friend. Like Dave, I have no idea what a God’s Blessing is. Google is not helping.

This strip includes the first mention of Dave being Unitarian. I think I did this mainly because I knew a lot of Unitarian nerds. Still do, actually.

Dave’s skepticism about the “mailbag day” concept turned out to be well founded. I ended up doing about three of these, total, over the entire course of the strip. I think this was partly because the eventual creation of a Narbonic mailing list and message board alleviated the need for a mail forum in the strip itself, and mostly because it required me to draw a lengthy, full-color Sunday strip. I’m extremely lazy, doubly so on weekends.