Genuinely happy with all three of these strips two decades later. The pirate joke got so, so much mileage in Flatliner and in real life. The true beauty was in the narrative of telling someone the joke again and again, at every possible opportunity, annoying the living hell out of them, until they too found it funny and started telling it, themself.
The bear-riding-the-cat strip became a running gag in its own right with a callback I remember down the line that was entirely for the purpose of trolling a guy who had been reading Flatliner for years before we’d met him. That was a wonderful moment.
This Asian Theater class that everyone at my school seemed to take as a giveaway credit which I have now referenced twice in the strip was actually one of the more fascinating classes I ever took. Unfortunately I was a dumb gamer teen who could never seem to stay awake during daytime hours.
