One of the things that we pride ourselves (rather foolishly) on is the continuity within Professor Hobo. No, the continuity isn’t flawless. That would be too much work. But we do pride ourselves on the fact that once a character is introduced, it’s very likely they’ll turn up again. Our friend Satan here first appeared in one of our cartoons, but you can’t keep a good Dark Prince down.
Or something.
In college we used to have a Halloween party every year. They met with varying levels of success, but it seemed appropriate that this should be echoed somehow in the comic strip. This is also one of the strip’s that really establishes President Czar’s complete indifference towards what his employees have to say.
Blind Professor and Dr. Bones make cameos again in this week’s strip. Dr. Bones seems vitally important for a Halloween strip, obviously. Both characters became fixtures of the Professor Hobo universe, though rarely featured in strips.
While perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, it is fairly accurate to compare working at a university to being part of a feudal serf system. This was one of those strips that we received far more feedback from professors than from students. It also established Mr. Mittens first real activity as head of the faculty senate. Many more shenanigans would follow from his administrative work.
Dr. Bones makes a cameo in this strip, along with the Masked Professor and the old science professor. It became a running gag to reuse certain characters to fill out backgrounds.
Of all the original strips, this was by far the biggest headache of them all. I am not sure if any of the humor comes off anymore, because we rewrote the thing 20 or more times. We really shot too big with it, wanting far too many characters and far too much going on. Add in the fact that we were introducing three whole new characters and it was just a mess.
In the second panel at the bottom left you may notice a character wearing a mask. No, he is not someone random or a bad drawing of the blind professor, as some have guessed. He was actually a character named, creatively, The Masked Professor. He was slated to become a recurring character, but we simply ran out of time and couldn’t fit him any of the remaining strips that year.
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