034 “Hard Sell”

Madame X strips are always good for jams. I don’t know why. This strip was pencilled and inked over my layouts by Reirei, who visited Japan for a couple of weeks.

As I mentioned in the commentary for #22 (“Why Friends are Cool”), some of the lines for the swearing friend at that time came from IRC chats. Corey Lewis, who also did the very gay “We are Not Gay” strip in the guest section (#11), provided the one line, “You fuck cows in retrospect.” Good job, Corey. People still quote me that line in their E-mail.

The big “JOY” in the third panel is, of course, a Ren and Stimpy thing.

The last panel is a layout BLUNDER, one of the biggest I’ve made in the strip. The final word balloon crosses the action and looks like it’s coming out of Touro’s pants. Just awful. If I had the chance to do this one over again, I would reverse the two characters in the 3rd and 4th panels. Nowadays, I do rough sketches to check for layout errors, but this is something I should have detected when I did the layouts. Shame on me.