File this under "the hazards of continuity." Sitting down Sunday afternoon to write the script for these pages, I found I couldn't for the life of me remember if Agrippina had ever met Sam or Coil before. It further struck me then that next week will mark six-and-a-half years of the Daily Grind Contest and just shy of 3,400 pages of comics that I've got up here!
Which is why I spent an hour of my writing time clicking around the Archives instead. It always puts me in mind of a line I read once from Isaac Asimov to the effect that he'd never understood all those writers who say they can't stand to read their old stories. He loved reading his old stuff, he said, because from the very start, he had always written the sorts of stories that he wanted to read.
I'm the same way. And yes, bits and pieces of the old Daily Grind chapters creak a bit, but honestly? I could say the same thing about some of the more recent storylines. And the artwork, well, as I remarked over on a post Roz Gibson wrote about the seeming inevitability of artistic decline, I can't see any way short of losing a limb or going blind that my stuff could get any worse than it already is.
Still, as near as I can tell, from Pina's first appearance in the middle of "Holiday," our 12th storyline, to Coil's first "giant size" appearance near the beginning of "Hypocrisy," our 20th storyline, to Sam tucked in there among all the kidnapped orphans about the middle of "Foreign Correspondence," our 27th storyline, this is the first time all three of these characters have been in the same place at the same time. If anyone can find any different, please let me know, and I'll haul out the "retroactive continuity" wagon.
Fifty-One - Menuet a Tre
