Those aren’t the genetically modified gerbils. Only Artie’s GM in this storyline. It hardly matters though, normal gerbils are stronger than they look. Ever been headbutted by one?

(Don’t worry, fellow newspaper editors – you can simply decant panels 2, 4, 5 and 7 into one strip and panels 1, 3 6 and 9 into another, and thus produce two sufficiently paced humour strips. You won’t get this fortunate with future length infractions!)

I know it’s a given by now, but today’s instance of flood-filled grey (and canonically inaccurate flood-filled grey, at that) will not go without remiss! And what, young lady, am I to make of the improbable angle from which that bullet’s being fired? I was under the assumption that the gerbils and their pilfered video-controlling device were still on the floor.

And thus, Helen did meet again with the only person in the world that she is afraid of. This must surely be a cataclysmic experience for her, having been convinced up until panel 9 that Mom and her reign of terror had gone from her life, and the world at large, forever.

The current setting would probably incinerate a human target just as completely and with as little collateral damage. Or a mastodon. Or a ninety-foot-tall fire-breathing terror-gerbil.

P.S. Bwahahahahaha!

Speaking of which, that’s three settings.  We later find out that there are four, all deadly.  So what’s the fourth one? 

Fun fact: apparantly, right now is possibly the first time in history that anyone has ever been inspired to concoct the phrase “No taxation without disintegration.“

I’d like to congratulate the artist on (unintentionally?) promoting the illusion that Dana (gerbil on left), when viewed face-on, has a circle-beard and goatee. Mwahahahahaha, like-mother-like-daughter etc.