Fun Interesting Fact about today's strip: A week or so after it went up the first time, back in 2000, I ran across a strip at another webcomic, Spaz Labs, that had used essentially the same joke a few weeks earlier. Now, not only had I not seen the Spaz Labs strip before I did mine, but in fact I had written this Soup strip several months earlier, before the Spaz Labs strip had even run. So there was no question about my having plagiarized the Spaz Labs strip, even subconsciously. Still... this is the sort of coincidence that would very probably look like plagiarism to someone who didn't know the details, especially since the two strips did come out only a few weeks apart.

Not that anyone has ever accused me of plagiarizing the other strip. Soup's readership was never large, after all, and I don't know that Spaz Labs was ever a well-known strip either, so it's entirely possible that no one else ever even saw both strips and noticed the similarity. However, the next time you accuse a writer or cartoonist of plagiarism, keep this example in mind... however damning the evidence may seem, sometimes it really is just a coincidence.

(On the positive side, though, in a way seeing the similar Spaz Labs strip was a bit of a relief... I'd been worried the joke in this strip might be sort of weak, but the creator of Spaz Labs had not only used the same joke, but he'd used it as the culminating punchline of a week-long storyline. So... apparently there was at least one other person in the world who thought the joke was funny...)

In other notes, wow, in panel 2 the hero has gigantic shoulders. Er... perhaps I should rethink having removed that header warning about the art in the early strips being bad...