I’d just like to mention that I’m well aware that black widows almost never kill their mates during reproduction and that decapitation during sex is most commonly associated with praying mantises and that neither species actually does this in real life and only very rarely under the strains of captivity and scientific observation and let’s face it we’d probably all get a bit nuts if someone made you do it in a little glass jar under a magnifying glass while they scribbled notes on a clip board and muttered “fascinating, fascinating”.

Maybe I seem like a bit of a smartypants right now, shooting my mouth off about my vast knowledge of insects and their sexy myths, but last year when I was selling prints and comics in Montreal a girl at the table beside me pointed out that the painstaking markings on my butterflies were quite accurate but indicated that they were in fact female monarchs, which made me feel silly and also blew the concept of my strip out of the water.  Those markings are something that I didn’t correct in this week’s update, because let’s face it, it’s just a damn comic strip, and more importantly, I’ll be good god damned when I take drawing advice from a french girl who makes sci-fi fantasy chapbooks.

And lastly, as I think now about that day and how much she had to share about insects and questing and leveling up, I’d just like to say I sometimes empathize with how the second butterfly must feel; severely limited in his options for social fulfillment to a discouragingly small number of species.