What is the reason for Dave quelling Helen’s megalomania? Is it that Helen simply has more to lose when she has him around, and is dissuaded from dangerous japes? Does the simple feeling of love in her heart bridle her unceasing rage at the world and all in it?

Or, perhaps more sinisterly, is experimenting on Dave an alternative outlet for her mayhem urges? Rather than the world, is Dave’s biochemistry a more desirable battleground against order and reason? She may be shouting and cackling less, but is the wildness just driven under the surface?

I believe a combination of these explanations can almost produce the full picture here.

The thing that made this twist surprising to me is that, even when alone, and while Dave was dead, Helen had almost never seemed ravingly insane.  Evil, yes, which I guess is a madness of its own. Maybe I just work with the wrong sort of people.  (Well, of course, … computer science graduates….)

There’s funny, and there’s charming. If you could make it charming, that would be fine.

We already have some idea of what Helen might’ve gotten up to in the pre-Dave days.

This is a pretty resonant concept to introduce in this one strip, that love can conquer even madness. You could even argue it’s a bit too strongly/unsubtly accentuating the main themes of Narbonic. But I do like that this grand secret to madness that propels Helen and Dave throughout the story is only noticed and remarked upon by clownish Mell.

He’s sane; we’ve seen the sign, he’s sewin’ soon.

Mell is relishing the fact that she’s suddenly got a secret life that her mild-mannered friend is unbeknownst to.