That's a more powerful drag on blogging than you might realize. In the several million plus word history of Websnark, I've said a lot of things. Some of them haven't sucked. Others have. On the whole, I've done okay. Mostly.

On the other hand, very few bloggers manage to get married as a result of their blogs. By any standard, I'm way ahead of the game. But I digress.

The thing is... I don't have a lot of impetus to repeat myself. When I have new things to say or something catches my imagination, I write about it, but there's only so many times you can write about putting a fucking cast page on your webcomic and keeping it at least moderately kept up before it all sounds repetitive. That's what ultimately killed my enthusiasm for State of the (Web)Cartoonist, by the by. It's not that I ran out of strips I read. It's that the stuff I was saying about them just felt repetitive. "X does this pretty well." "Y used to do this better." "Z writes a better strip than I gave Z credit for." Blah blah blah blah blah.

But, there's still stuff I like to write about. And every now and again I'll bring them back up. Sometimes it'll be old hat, sometimes it won't.

Which brings us back, yet again, inexorably, to City of Heroes.

A lot of my friends have given up on the old City. "It's too repetitive," they say. "Gameplay doesn't evolve," they say. "I'd rather play World of Warcraft because it has variety," they say. So, you know. They're weak. Weak like flowers. Weak like children. Weak like children of flowers.

But they have a point. For all the (pretty freaking amazing) content updates that City of Heroes has had in its five year history, it's also pretty long in the tooth. There's only so many times you want to fight Skulls and Hellions. Only so many times you want to contend with Nemesis or run the horror that is the Positron Task Force. Only so many times you want to do the Portal missions or claw your way into Grandville. And when something new comes out, it's usually pretty limited. When Issue 12 hit the servers -- that being "The Midnight Hour" -- it included what looked like a ton of new content. New missions for Levels 10-20 of both heroes and villains. New post-35 content in a co-op zone back in Roman times. The epic archetypes for Villains, giving redside players access to Widows and Wolf Spiders and their various paths for growth. A remaking of the Hollows trial zone to give it more gameplay and missions and stuff. UI improvements. And "powerset proliferation" that opened new powers to new archetypes and even added more powersets to the game entirely.

That seems like it should be enough, damn it. That seems like it should be more than enough, for a good long time.

But... more powersets means more alts, not more content. The Epic villains only applied to the relatively small subset of players who took a villain all the way to 50, and then the custom content for those new epic villains was... relatively sparse. The new Midnight Squad missions pretty much included a pizza run to read content (customized for your character origin, not that it seemed to make much of a difference other than as a proof of concept) about the origins of superpowers, a single mission string at lower level, a mission string to 'become a member of the Midnight Squad,' and then access to an entirely new and pretty zone with... not a lot to do in it. There was an introduction mission string, plus the chance to have continual repetitive missions, and a really good task force which needed six players to try out. They came right out and admitted that the new zome of Cimerora was more a proof of concept and a place where content could be added than a fleshed out zone in its own right.

Put simply... it didn't take long for everything new in Issue 12 to feel played out. A nice fresh influx of content... which quickly felt kind of stale.

This might seem odd, but you have to remember something important about most new content at City of Heroes. If they build new virtual sets, that can be really pretty and really interesting and there can be lots of easter eggs and the like. However, new missions really come down to new text to read and maybe a few new enemies to fight, but for the most part things work the same way that they always have. You click the glowing object to 'disarm' it or 'collect' it or 'interact' with it. You use essentially the same tactics to fight enemies regardless of what their outer appearances look like. It really, really comes down to what you read in the text boxes, and once you've read them... you've read them.

(I have some friends who clearly don't care even slightly about what's in those text boxes. For them, new content is meaningless without new gameplay. There's not much to be done for them, though.)

Cryptic NCSoft NorCal Paragon Studios rallied, though. They came out with two more content updates and announced a third within that same year. The first (Issue 13 - "Power and Responsibility") gave a new system of 'day jobs,' letting players get bonuses for where they happened to log out (and badges badges badges to boot). It also filled out Cimerora's sparse missions (somewhat), and put in several new systems (like a leveling pact that lets you pair your experience to someone else, keeping you both in sync, and a system that lets you earn some of the better trinkets without having to do some of the more repetitive content and the like). It was okay, and kind of cool, and once again lost its new content smell pretty quickly.

The next issue -- Issue 14 - "Architect" -- was the big one. It got monumental press, and was almost universally loved, in part because it really did change the City of Heroes experience. Now, players can actually create their own content. They can create their own missions and create their own enemies (which are actually considerably harder to beat than most of the in-game enemies). It's amazing. And the Mission Architect itself is really well put together. There is amazing flexibility, and tons of maps, and the same capacity for costume designing you get for character creation with the added bonus that all the special event costume bits are available too (with the use, admittedly, of skee-ball tickets you collect when playing in the Architect. And no, I'm not kidding.)

If you wondered where I was in, oh, February and March? I got into the closed beta. I lived in the Mission Architect. Weds was very, very kind and understanding despite my spending hours a day creating new enemy groups and building mission strings, playing other peoples' Mission Architect missions, and in generally just devouring this thing. And then it released and it was a monumental and fast success, with incredibly fast growth....

...which then stopped.

See, you have three slots you can develop. Three mission arcs, with up to 5 missions each. That's it. When you've built three mission arcs, you can hope for one of the Developers to decide your mission is one of the best they've seen -- out of the literally tens of thousands being written -- and make your arc "Dev's Choice," making the arc permanent and freeing a development slot for you. Or you can manage to get a plurality of players -- several thousand being required -- to rate your arc as one of the best in the game, putting it (at least temporarily) in the Hall of Fame, which does the same thing.

Otherwise, if you want to publish a new arc, you have to delete an old one.

I'm sure their intention is to keep the database clear. After all, there are so many more thousands of arcs than there are players to play them. (Before the Beta finished, one of the Dev's admitted that the Beta testers alone had managed to create more content than the Developers had made in the official part of the game over the five years City of Heroes had been out). But the problem is, the kind of person who loves this kind of shit doesn't want to delete their arcs. Someone might play them, after all. They want to hold onto them. They want to build sequels to them. They want to keep going.

Only they can't. It doesn't take that long to make three mission arcs. Even three good ones. Inside of a week or two the kind of person who... oh, I don't know, buys the freaking "Architect" edition of the game on a store shelf is going to have more content than he can publish.

And it's not even a matter of letting your content out to play for a while, then rotating it. If you unpublish one of your story arcs to make room for another, even temporarily, all the ratings and evidence that people have played the first arc disappear. You are starting from scratch. So if a few dozen people have played your arc and you're still sitting at a 4 rating or above, you really don't want to shoot those ratings in the head so you can publish something untested.

I said above -- the only ways... the only ways to get more slots right now are to catch the eye of a developer (and get "Dev's Choice") or to earn your way into the Hall of Fame. And as of this writing there are exactly fourteen missions selected for Developer's Choice (out of 168,000+ arcs that have been published to date). So only fourteen different people (no one has more than one Dev's Choice, and the rumor is no one will get more than one) can have a fourth arc published by that method.

And Hall of Fame? Please. Hall of Fame is conditional. You have to keep your averages up. Groups of players formed coalitions to auto-five-star everything they produced in order to try and force their way into the Hall of Fame. Other groups of players began auto-one or zero-starring everything with five stars to combat it. The rating system is currently so polluted it's eligible for Superfund cleanup money. With over a month of play and over 168,000 missions published (though not necessarily active), a grand total of none have hit the Hall of Fame. It is, at least for the moment, not only a non-entity but not worth going for.

Which is not the worst of their problems. Hand in hand with all that have been a startlingly large number of farming missions that have been built, and a lot of people who are exploiting the Mission Architect to create powerlevelers' dreams. I've heard rumors of characters going from L1 to L50 in a day, and I can believe it. They've started to crack down on these things and redesign the badges you can earn from the system, but it's going to be an ongoing problem and it's further coloring the long term success of the Mission Architect. It probably doesn't help that the people who are really into the creative side of the system run out of arc slots and either have to dump their output or stop creating, while the farmers can cheerfully nuke a farming mission that gets compromised and build the next one in their list without batting an eye.

Now. I'll let you in on a little secret. You know those 14 Dev's Choice missions? Yeah, one of them is mine. Arc ID 1006, Ripping Out Reform. It's a low level villain romp where you're trying to keep efforts to reform the Rogue Island Police from succeeding. I'm proud of it. I'm very proud of it being one of the fourteen Dev's Choices. And as a result, I have not three but four published arcs. Of my three non-Dev's Choice arcs, not one of them... not one of them is below 4 stars in rating, for whatever that's worth in this environment. I like them all. I don't want to delete any of them.

As a result... the Mission Architect -- which I'm apparently pretty good at -- is meaningless to my ongoing City of Heroes experience. I can't publish any more story arcs. I'm done. And I only have so much right to complain, since I'm already ahead of put near everybody else.

I sent a message in the system, begging for a chance to send them more money and open up more arcs. (I honestly can't afford to spend the fifteen a month extra it would cost to have another account purely so I could have the three slots open to that account, but I can drop some one-time cash on getting new slots over time.) Sadly, a few weeks later, that message hasn't even been read. It doesn't matter, they've heard it from a lot of other people. C'est ca. There's nothing to be done for it. I can play other peoples' arcs, but barring a new system that lets us buy new arcs, there's nothing I can add.

Amusingly, we now have new content pouring into the game. New missions, new challenges, new text to read, new costumes to look at. And some of it's freaking amazing. And so people who don't care about creating content are sitting pretty. They can play all kinds of new stuff. But the major selling point of the new update -- the content creation system -- either has a very short shelf-life in a player's experience or encourages the player to not get emotionally attached to what he writes.

Also amusingly, the bar for further new content issues has now been raised. We have a new issue announced for early summer -- Issue 15 - "Anniversary." It sounds pretty damn spiffy, with the return of one of the best of the villain groups the game has ever had, the 5th Column. (Long time readers may recall I had rather firm opinions about the removal of the 5th Column from the game.) But while I'm glad to hear there's going to be some new 5th Column content in the game, it's no longer as exciting for me because... well, because there's tons of 5th Column content in the game right now -- it's just in the Mission Architect. I had an incredibly fun time not too long ago fighting Evil Deep Freeze Nazis on the Moon. Do you know how awesome the official return of the 5th Column will have to be to engage deep enthusiasm compared to that? And even if it is awesome, just knowing there'll be a couple of new Taskforces (solo players need not get excited) to play is no big deal. There's vastly more content in the Mission Architect than can be played, and a lot of it's as good or better than anything the developers come up with. They also have new costume stuff and the ability to change costumes by doing a backflip (which is an extension of a recent paid 'booster pack' that lets you infringe on DC's trademark transform by being hit by lightning or infringe on Warner Bros' trademark spin around into a new costume, among others.

In other words, it may be cool stuff, but it's not amazingly cool stuff the way it would have been, say, a year ago. And they're going to fight that impression with any free content update that doesn't have a significant gameplay experience improvement going forward.

On the other hand, an accidental leak (which actually seems accidental, this time) has revealed the first paid expansion since City of Villains is on the horizon. City of Heroes: Going Rogue is going to cost money, but will also include at least one and perhaps many new zones, plus a new "alignment system" that lets you ultimately Fall From Grace (making a hero into a villain) or Redeem Yourself (making a villain into a hero). That's exciting, and it opens up some really cool possibilities.....

...until people get used to having Corrupters and Masterminds (probably under new names) on the 'hero' side, in which case it falls under the heading of 'new text boxes to read and costumes to look at until you've seen them all' again. And with my luck, half the stuff will only be available to a group of six players or more, or be locked to level 40 or above, which quite frankly is boring. (The chance to Redeem a villain is exciting. The chance to have my L50 Mastermind gad about in Paragon City instead of the Rogue Islands isn't.)

Still, we don't have hard details yet, and I'm optimistic. It's certainly possible there will be a wide range of new things, and there may well be solid new gameplay options. As the first paid expansion since City of Villains, with its own logo and everything, it's possible Going Rogue will include new archetypes to play. It may give us new power customization options (a system that's incredibly hard to retrofit into City of Heroes, but a paid update may give them enough resources to do it). It may let us start as a 1st level character in an entirely new City/Universe, with multiple zones of entirely new content on the level of Wrath of the Lich King over on World of Warcraft. It may add new functionality. New options. New ways of playing. New powersets. New more robust tactical situations. It may be a complete upgrade across the board. It may be a retrofitting of old content into new and exciting things. It may be an excuse to rebalance powers (and endure huge arguments from people, including very possibly me) to help roles fit together better. It may be everything City of Heroes needs.

And almost certainly it will keep City of Heroes's competitive edge over Champions Online (which has been delayed and which has had rumors of being... underwhelming in many ways, none of which I can confirm since I've not been selected for that beta) and the eventual DC Universe Online (and the re-announced Marvel MMO). No matter what the new MMORPGs bring to the table, it will be a long time before they can offer the depth that City of Heroes does.

The problem is, if one of them offers truly next-generation gameplay over City of Heroes, there will be defections. Maybe a lot of defections.

City of Heroes needs to keep really innovating and building truly new things -- not just content-wise, but gameplay-wise. And when they do, in fact, develop a truly new and innovative thing like the Mission Architect? It's probably a good idea to ensure their players get to use it for more than a couple of weeks.

You know. I'm just saying.

Let me elaborate with an anecdote on one of the few times I've seen a movie more than once in a theater, and just about the only time I've seen a movie in a theater twice in a short amount of time.

It was early 1987, and I was a young tyro at Boston University. I was still new to post-high school life and a bit drunk with the power of a T Pass. I got a stipend from the United States Government as part of an early -- and unfortunate -- flirtation with the United States Navy. And I had a piece of plastic that let me ride the Boston T wherever and whenever I wanted.

And so in January of 1987, I took a ride on the T on an unseasonably warm day to the Government Center stop, just to tool around and see the sights. And I noticed that Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was still playing in a theater. I hadn't yet seen this movie, because... well, I have no idea why I hadn't seen it yet. My friends had, and they liked it. Still, I didn't have much to do and hey, the theater was almost empty -- it was the middle of the day and Trek had been out for weeks at that point. So I went. Why not.

Two hours later, I marched out of the theater on an absolute high. I was charged -- no, I was supercharged. The last thing I wanted to do was go back to my room. So I turned around, and walked right back in, and proceeded to watch the film for a second time.

I'd never done that before. I haven't done that specific thing since. I've seen movies more than once in the theater since then -- but that was always because I had seen it with one group of friends and then a different group of friends wanted to see it too. It was group activity, in other words, not "oh my God I need to see that movie again." And certainly in recent years I've felt no need to be a repeat film watcher. The DVD will be out soon enough, after all. And there's always way more to watch.

On Thursday at 7 pm, Wednesday, a mutual friend and I all went to see Star Trek, at the first possible showing.

On Sunday, Wednesday and I saw it again. I couldn't imagine waiting for the DVD release -- I had to see this movie again.

So, taking it for what it's worth, I liked the movie.

We're about to move into the main part of this essay, so I'm going to bring back the ancient art of the Cut For Spoilers. Don't continue unless you're okay with them

Seriously, I'm going to reveal everything and its brother about this film.

Up to and including stuff that was misleading in the trailer.

Okay, not a lot of that, but a bit.

Okay, a bit involving hot chicks and underwear.

Right. Last chance.

(RSS readers -- click the link to the main entry on the site, or just click here to continue.

This seems odd to me, especially in the era of GenX hitting their forties, because if there's one thing my Generation and those that followed us love? It's shit for kids.

Seriously, man. We're the ones who made Spider-Man a monumentally successful movie franchise. We're the ones who moved Cartoon Network out of the business of making cartoons for children and into the business of manufacturing pop culture. We're the ones who keep Boomerang in business, especially after 7 pm. We're the ones who were rabid about collecting plastic toys that changed from robot to car and back until it hit the point that it too became a successful movie franchise. (And on the heels of it, we have ourselves a G.I. Joe movie coming out too. And it's not starring the Joes from the Baby Boom and it's not starring the poor Sigma Sixers who came after us.)

Oh, we call it "irony," or we demand that "comics aren't just for kids," or we tell people that Superman S's in sparkle-pink (I'm sorry, Supergirl S's, as if Supergirl ever wore sparkle-pink in her four-color life) is a fashion statement. But part of the reason Easter and Halloween are growing in our culture is that Gen-Xers and those who follow don't stop celebrating them when they graduate from college. We want our Christmas Stockings. We eat Count Chocula and watch Scooby Doo on Saturdays. We love shit that's for kids, and we're (officially) not ashamed of it.

But we fucking hate April Fool's Day. Which is so weird to me because it's the absolute pinnacle of "shit for kids." April Fool's Day is the last refuge of 9 year olds, because the 19-49 year olds don't want it. Because they fucking hate April Fool's Day.

We talk for days leading up to April Fool's Day about how much we fucking hate April Fool's Day. We talk about how annoyed we are that when we get up and stumble over to our computers on 1-April that "it's international don't believe anything you see on the Internet day." On April Fool's Day, Gen-X and the Internet Age put on their crotchety old man pants and declare themselves to be entirely too grown up to enjoy people making fun of themselves and of us.

Which is the cusp of it. No matter how ridiculous we get in our love of things from our youth (seriously -- the chief complaint about Watchmen wasn't that it took liberties with the source material, it's that it didn't take enough liberties with the source material and one of the most revered comic book series of the last six years was All-Star Superman, which seemed pretty pedestrian to me, particularly after Moore did it eight times better in Supreme, but because Morrison aped the more ridiculous -- and cool -- elements of the Silver Age Superman instead of declaring Superman too cool to have enemies with a square planet it's being held up as seminal and groundbreaking) we have absolutely no sense of humor about ourselves. None. No matter how good a prank is, "you got me" is never said cheerfully. It's said behind clenched teeth as we fake being a good sport and secretly plan how to kill the fucker with a car.

So, we're buzz-kills about this one, because we don't like to be made fun of. We're okay with other people looking stupid -- Jon Stewart, Matt Groening, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Steven Colbert, Seth MacFarlane, Seth Green and put near everything else we do like comes from mocking other people -- but we don't like to look stupid. We laugh at the depiction of a hopeless nerd on Robot Chicken so long as that depiction is so broad and so unrealistic that we can pretend we're not the ones being laughed at. We laugh when someone looks like a fucking moron, so long as that someone isn't us.

And the heart of April Fool's Day -- the absolute point of it -- is that it makes fun of us. It says "hah! You bought this hoax! HAH HAH!" And we have to grit our teeth and mutter "yeah, you got me." And as stated above, we then plan vehicular murder. No one likes April Fool's Day.

Except, of course, for kids. Kids love it, because they're just young enough to not give a shit about looking stupid.

And the thing that gets me, beyond everything else, is that's exactly what we're looking for. We're looking for that essence, that moment in time, that part of ourselves who didn't give a shit about looking stupid, they just wanted to have a good time. When we read a comic book on the bus, we do so ironically or we do so defiantly, or we change the entire comic book industry to be more mature all in an effort to legitimize the act of reading a comic book on the bus, because deep down we just want to read comic books but we don't want to look stupid while we're doing it. We go to things like BotCon or Anime conventions or SF Cons or one of the various ComiCons in part because they're a good time, and in part because once we walk through those doors we don't look stupid liking what we like. It's safe. And the one thing that pisses us off is the television crew that shows up and films us, because we know we're going to have Stormtroopers, chicks in slave Leia costumes and unshaven fat guys dressed as Sailor Moon on the evening news, and the one thing we can't stand is that makes us look stupid.

Fuck that noise. Fuck it in the ear. I like silver age comics. I don't like them ironically. I don't like them nostalgically. I don't like recontextualizing them for my adult sensibilities. I don't like them because "they're not just for kids." I like them for what they are, on their own merits, because I enjoy super heroes fighting supervillains. I like them. I enjoy reading about the Levitz era Legion, or the Wolfeman/Perez Teen Titans, or the Claremont/Austin X-Men. I enjoy reading about Steve Rogers dressing up as Captain America and fighting Nazis while defending the rights of minorities and challenging us to be better people. I enjoy reading about Billy Batson saying his magic word and becoming the quintessential good guy without feeling like we have to make him, his sister and his disabled best friend suffer unimaginable torments to make them 'edgy.' I like it.

When I watch Super Friends on TV, I watch it because I fucking like Super Friends. I don't need to redress it or dismiss it or make jokes about it to enjoy watching Superman get shaken by Solomon Grundy or Sinestro trick Green Lantern into moving the planet Earth closer to the sun and then forgetting to fix it. Yeah, I know it's dopy if I pretend to be an adult when I watch it. But I like it on its own merits.

Yeah, I enjoyed Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, but I also enjoy Birdman and the Galaxy Trio. I like this shit because I like this shit.

And I like April Fool's Day.

Let me say that more obnoxiously.

I like April Fool's Day!

I like it when people are clever. I like it when they take the time and effort to build something well, even if the purpose is to make me look credulous. I like when David Willis ends Shortpacked, launches 'Ultimate Roomies,' and redesigns his entire website based on the new strip. And works really hard to sell that fact. I think it's hysterical and I think it shows a great sense of self deprecation on his part and I think it shows a lot of time and effort to, in the end, celebrate a day where the world is whatever the fuck we want to make of it, and if we buy the hoax, even for a second, that's okay because god damn it, it's April Fool's Day. And it depresses me that in the Webcomics World, what was once a day of joy and anarchy (and for many years a day when artists would trade strips and try to do each others' jobs) has become a day when people solemnly declare that they're not going to be having any pranks or shenanigans, because they know that people hate that.

One of the comments to Willis's tour de force performance on his blog? "And so the worst fucking day of the year begins."

Jesus fuck, man. Get over it. It's April Fool's Day. Enjoy it for what it is. Read the epic saga of Cadie. Try to buy some Squeeze Bacon or just wince at the thought of it. Get excited for the Groundhog Day musical. Have some fun with it.

And if you can't, stop being a fucking buzzkill because you're terrified of looking stupid. If you just can't get in touch with your inner seven year old enough to just enjoy what this is, don't actively try to ruin it for everyone else. If nothing else? Because the only way to really look stupid on April Fool's Day is to preemptively try not to look stupid on April Fool's Day.

Seriously. Your declarations and your bubble-bursting? Is the ultimate victory of anyone who ever fooled you. They managed to take a thirty-second joke no one will ever remember and change your fucking life with it. You not only were 'gotten?' You never stopped being gotten, and everyone knows it because you keep telling them.

Now that's comedy.

(From Least I Could Do! Click on the thumbnail for full sized pre-employment sexual harassment suit!)

Set aside the tit joke before we talk about this. The tit joke was a given. This is Least I Can Do. You either like the tit joke or you don't.

This extended subplot's been interesting to me for a number of reasons. One because it brings Issa back as a significant cast member. She's been on the shelf way too long, and she's too interesting to be on the shelf. But the other is the parallel between Rayne and Issa and their career trajectories.

Rayne is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, at his heart. He's handsome, can nail dozens of chicks a week with little to no consequences despite -- let's be honest -- not being nice about it. He's got a bitching car. He's got a great group of friends. He has wild adventures. He's... well, he's the male equivalent of the Hot Geek Amazon -- the perfect woman who's gorgeous and can quote Lord of the Rings trivia with the best of them.

And, much like Issa, he's never really had to grow up. In part because everything comes easily to him. Women come easily to him. Success comes easily to him. When he writes a bad time travel novel is goes into a bidding war between major publishers. He lives the Life of Riley, for those who remember what the Hell the Life of Riley is.

And, a few years back... he got a job at IDS industries.

One he wasn't qualified for, which he got by falsifying his references, and which put later cast member Nancy at risk of her job. All to sleep with Marcy McKean, the CEO. Which he sort of did later, but by then he was ensconced in his job.

To do so, he took a leave of absence from his newspaper, where he was writing a column. Note that he didn't quit, at that point. He took a leave. Because he was just going to sleep with Marcy and then quit. Only somewhere along the way he forgot to leave. And apparently he turned out to be pretty good at his job.

Now, Issa needs a job. And she's been pushing Rayne to get her one, because her entire adult life she's worked at a gas station convenience store. She has no job skills. She has nothing but an impressive rack. She doesn't live the Life of Riley. And Rayne has been resistant to help her -- in part because he feel she needs to grow up (and Rayne is stunningly judgmental about his friends), and in part because it would be highly irresponsible to give her a job at his company when she wasn't qualified for it. (Including, I would point out, a data entry job. Which is, to be blunt, entry level.)

In other words... she's exactly in the same position he was. Unqualified to even be in the room. The only difference was confidence and intention. Rayne's intention was to have sex with a hot chick and then leave. Issa legitimately wants a job that will give her practical skills and experience and help her start her real life.

Between that and Rayne's missing the writer's lifestyle, I have to wonder if we're finally going to shoot that gun on the mantlepiece. (Chekov's Law states that if you threaten a secretary's job if she gets fooled by a sleazeball who's faking his references to have sex with a hot CEO in the first act, you must fire her in the third). After all, sooner or later the truth has to come out. Rayne has enemies at IDS, and even if he's good at his job, falsifying his resume to get it is the sort of thing they fire you for regardless of the results.

And if he gets Issa a job... someone who knows Rayne had no qualifications for his job will be working there. Accidents happen.

Where this goes should be interesting. Though don't expect a resolution next week. Sohmer takes his time with these things. He lets them perk and build. Which might be surprising if all you've noticed so far were the tit jokes.

(From XKCD. Click on the thumbnail for full sized analysis!

I'm still dead. Especially today -- I've been sick as a dog all weekend. It's funny, really. The medical regimen I'm on is working really, really well -- my heart is in fantastic shape, which is good news for anyone who nearly died of congestive heart failure at the start of the Bush administration. But between the cocktail of pills I take every day and residual effects of the cardiomyopathy my immune system doesn't work all that well. I get sick often, and when I do I get it bad.

None of which is why I'm here. I'm just here to say this should totally be a tee-shirt or other marketed design. "I'm your statistically significant other" should be a Facebook relationship option, damn it.

If I can read five of your strips and, after reading five of your strips still have no sense of what your webcomic's premise is? You have done it wrong.

Seriously. This is not decompression. This is "failing to convey a sense of your webcomic."

Thank you. I look forward to speaking to you again. Perhaps in April.