Today we see a rhythm unfolding, where it’s a verbatim-unfunny strip sandwiched in between two significantly better guest strips. Another guest strip from Jen, though more thoroughly set in the Flatliner world and somewhat accurate to how our (and most other) friendships with Jen worked. Then a discussion about time of day and sleep (groundbreaking), followed by Ian’s guest strip where we beat up a gnome and take its money to go to the arcade.
If I recall correctly Ian had at one point hand-drawn an outline of how the gnome strip would go, and if I had the wherewithal to use a scanner no one probably would have had to do the pixel by pixel editing this comic so often demanded.
Ian’s strip was posted on June 8th, 2002. I’m not sure if high school was behind us entirely or not at this point (and I’m fairly certain it will not be directly addressed in the comic). The first chapter runs right through the end of my one and only semester of college outside Massachusetts.
Here we are at 24 strips, 42 more to go before this “chapter”ends, and I start disillusioning myself of the notion that Flatliner generally improves!
