The previous year’s Haiku-Off went well enough (and was easy enough to do) that I decided to make it an annual thing. Anything to fill a Sunday.

Dave and Helen returned to their usual genders after the last panel of the previous strip, so this is their first appearance as such post-swap.

Ellen and Mee-Lise are college friends. Ed Wells is…Ed Wells, always.

Would it have been better if I’d had the characters comment in haiku throughout, or would that have been even more annoying?

James Rice was one of the most frequent Sunday contributors, especially later on when we got into gerbil photos. There are some people here I know from the old MST3K newsgroup, but by 2002, I’d reached the point where most of my readers were not people I personally knew. Yes, it’s sad that it took this long.

Karoline is another college friend. I like that she completely ruined her own light-bulb joke.

As you can see from some of the haiku here, the mailing list got a little too busy for a while. In later years, activities like this got moved mainly to the message board.