Panel 1: I’m not really sure how much longer that “J-Lo” reference will hold up, but I’m impressed that it’s not all that anachronistic of a booty-related pop-culture ref. Could be worse, as with the occasion in a later volume in which I made an ill-fated dialogue reference to notably curvy sports reporter Ines Sainz circa 2010, the year when she’d been the subject of a short-lived firestorm over inappropriate player behavior at a New York Jets practice. Given the sheer, bludgeoning amount of sports-talk radio I listen to on a regular basis, perhaps I was overly confident that this once-famous callback would hold up in years to come. Or perhaps, as is often the case, I wasn’t thinking of future posterity when I made that throwaway reference. 

Panel 2: Must say, that basketball hoop’s net was remarkably complex and difficult to draw. Really don’t think I’d care to draw a b-ball comic, to say the least.

Panel 3: The upper part of Emp’s head is rather wonky, due to the fact that that I didn’t “draw through” Emp for this panel; that is, I didn’t scrupulously sketch out her complete head and shoulders on a separate piece of paper, then transfer and crop the image to fit the panel. Instead, in the interests of saving some time, I hastily rough-sketched her within the existing panel’s space, which led to some unfortunate flaws and distortions in the final drawing. Such are the wages of artistic sin, folks—or artistic “get it done now,” maybe.

Panels 4 and 5: The joke, here, in which fourth-wall breaking is theoretically revealed to be a direct dialogue reference—or is it?—still amuses me to an inexplicable and unwarranted degree. If I may quote the great Craig Ferguson yet again, “I made myself laugh, and that’s half the battle.”

-Adam Warren