Ah, the Haiku-Off. Genius. This started when Ed Wells started posting tech support questions on the mailing list in haiku form:

Click “Previous”. Blink.
Heart falls! Black Screen of Squid Ink!
Typo in the link.

After everyone traded haiku posts for a while, I realized, in a flash of uncharacteristic brilliance, that I could exploit them. I announced the First Annual Narbonic Haiku-Off and sat back to let the haiku roll in.

I love it when I don’t have to write my own comics.

Helen’s kimono is friggin’ adorable. Dave’s is okay except that it’s folded backwards because I used a flopped edition of Maison Ikkoku for reference. (In the last Haiku-Off, the characters comment that I’d never used reference before. This wasn’t strictly true. I just used inaccurate reference.) Their geta (wooden sandals) are pretty cute. Mell’s uniform didn’t come out so well because I’m not very good at drawing those things. Also, I shouldn’t have colored her socks yellow.

Among the poets are several names from previous Sunday features, plus some new people. At this point, Narbonic was attracting some readers I didn’t personally know, which was very exciting. A lot of these people are alumni of the “Mystery Science Theater” Usenet group.

Dave’s incongruous fondness for opera surfaces again. I’m a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan.

As Dave Barker’s haiku indicates, he had just gotten back from Puerto Rico, where he was studying transit systems for his master’s in transportation engineering. This will come up in a future Sunday feature.

Haiku of note here: Yosh Haraguchi’s impressive palindromic haiku, several haiku by official Tiny Print Guy Chris Ellmann, and a haiku by Andie W. Swell, Ed Wells’s pseudonym.