Ok so I sort of lied about how many pages this day has as this interview takes place on the same day, albeit super late. (It’s a show about economics and interviewing businessmen so it’s still working its way up to prime time.)

This will be an interesting experiment because really for the first time we’ll be spending a few pages away from the main cast, but I figured I needed to start setting up some story elements and characters for later.

“We’re interviewing the head of Machina Industries. I’m not going to say his name because the guy writing this comic can’t decide if that’s his first or last name, or if it’s a mononym like Sting or Madonna. Probably leaning towards mononym cause otherwise if it’s his surname then what, his full name is Motimer Deus? Brad? Jordache? No, just no.”

If any of Deus’s claims in panel 3 seem absurd, (I think shorting the banks for $7 billion is totally within the realm of realism actually – the upcoming movie The Big Short is about people who did this on a smaller scale, but only because they weren’t billionaires to start with.) especially moving a country up the GDP rankings so fast, keep in mind this world has super powered people in it, most of whom work for private industry, and Deus is probably “cheating” somehow.

#MakeComics: That map in the background showing all the countries with their local currencies might not look like it, but that took over 2 hours to make. I really would have thought something like that would already exist, like in open source clipart form, but my googling didn’t turn anything up. Obviously keeping something like that up to date would be a pain in the ass, and then someone has to decide whether to actually use the symbol for the local currency, or whatever they actually use the most when doing business. If any tourist can spend US dollars or Euros at any shop there, but they have a local currency that only gets used when people are buying their groceries, then what do you put on the map, or do you make multiple versions of it? Eh, not important for this show. It’s just a backdrop, but they probably get letters all the time about this country or that showing the wrong symbol.

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.