Hapax legomenon is a term for a word that only occurs only once in a given body of work. I had no real reason for using it as a name; I just liked the way it sounded. As I’ve said before, the Victorian story was pretty much made up as I went along.

Anonymous “true confessions” books were popular in the Victorian era, including books by servants of the famous or infamous, so I thought Victorian Dave could write one about his henching career. There’s a great real book by a woman who was a maid and married her wealthy employer, and she wrote about how he made her dress up in her maid uniform in the bedroom. Victorian Dave would probably have some spicy stuff to put into his own memoir, as it turns out. I was also inspired by the novel Mary Reilly, about Dr. Jekyll’s maid, which is much better than the movie.

This page turned out pretty good. A four-panel strip doesn’t give you much flexibility with layout and pacing, so it’s nice to be able to do a gradual zoom in like this. And the lazy grey fills don’t look as bad in sepiatone. They’re actually kind of striking.

I can’t always read my own Venusian language, but the dialogue in the first panel is definitely, “Hapax Legomenon!” and “You’re alive!”

Ah, body-swap stories. Strangely, there’s no straight-up brain-swapping in the main Narbonic strip, so I might as well have some in the Victorian serial.

The first panel still makes me smile a little. The smiling fish, and the Queensbury one-two, and Madblood’s hat tilted over his face…okay, it’s mostly Madblood’s hat.

The Hapax Legomenon’s size keeps changing relative to the human characters. DRAWING IS HARD.