In my memory this comic was a lot longer! I think there’s just a lot happening, and I thought about it a lot, worked on it exhaustively, and posted it in a very understated way (“Story’s over, guys!”), as I often did with the comic, hoping it would say more than what I was able to in words.

It was important to me that we didn’t see Eve actually reading the article, for she’s too busy living her life, too busy to even acknowledge the story Clark has written for the two of them. But if we have to guess, the editorial insult of swapping out “fuck” for Eve’s least favorite phrase is hopefully all that’s necessary.

It’s funny to today-me the way Jane clutches her tip jar, as if those crumpled dollars and phone numbers could somehow translate into a NY Times subscription. It’s symbolic, says then-me, but still I laugh. There was a period after Trump’s election where the paper of record did a good job selling people on the promise of not just information, but Truth in an age of lies. It seems we’re farther from a collective truth than ever, huddling into our private discords and subreddits and locked twitters, picking off bits of information like weak gazelles, gaping with astonished horror at the rest. Is truth just another object to fetishize and commodify, like the innocent past, the purity and wisdom of teens, or the tragedy of ecological collapse? Hit that subscribe button while I get to the bottom of this.