Welcome back! Welcome back, Mal & Dee! With a splash page. I am working on page 27 as you read this. I’m also working on the sequel to Spiders Are Helpful! I doubt as you read this that I’ll have page 27 ready to appear this week, but you never know.

This took too long. I was pretty wiped out coming back from San Francisco, right into the cold weather of Chicago and a heavy work schedule. I penciled it. I drew a Mort Inkingbot comic instead. I did the lettering. I inked Mal and then Dee. Then the monster. I wasn’t happy with ANY of it. I put in more detail at the top of the page, which I deleted because it doesn’t fit whatever the layout of the city was. It more references the previous page, which was set in the past in a town called Seaside, which the town that Mal & Dee live in likely isn’t, in their present. I don’t know.

Continuity, amiright? If you read Mal & Dee 1 or the previous strips, one plot point is The Mayor claiming that Mal used to belong to him. In my mind, this isn’t true. Or if he had a robot weapon like Mal, it might’ve been a different robot. In my mind, the Mayor THINKS he deserves having a symbolic shape changing weapon that grants him some kind of privilege. The Mayor certainly knew how to handle Mal and get him under the Mayor’s control, so maybe he does know, but I think there’s a former governing body or aristocracy that remembers how to command the robots. They just don’t because they’re currently very outnumbered by a variety of dangerous autonomous robots. NO ONE ASKED! I’m only telling you this because I don’t know if we’ll ever see The Mayor or those villagers again. M&D have a lot more adventures I want to get to, and we’re going to see a bit of Garytron and a lot more of the current robot cityfolk.

MERRY HOLIDAYS!