Friends De-United

It's meant to be raining in this strip, but I couldn't work out a way of doing a decent rain effect without drawing a shitload of penstrokes on a piece of paper and scanning that to use. Maybe next time. I ended up just changing the hue in the end, which makes it look more overcast than raining. You can, in that case, assume it's the first spot of rain that puts out Holly's fag in the fourth panel.

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that unlike Halifax, I have never slept with any of my teachers. Not even the ones I had crushes on. (It is a commonly accepted fact that all male students will, at some point, get a crush on at least one of their attractive female teachers; so too will girls always develop a crush on one of their male teachers. Some would wrongly interpret this as stirrings of the Oedipus/Elektra complex, whereas those in the know are aware that it is actually more like Stockholm Syndrome, where prisoners develop an attraction for their captors.)

I've had meetings like the ones shown in this strip, where I run into people I vaguely knew in high school. They're always the same, this kind of awkward comradeship in the air, and no matter how much you wanted to punch the shit out of them in school, there's this unwritten rule that you've now matured and should probably be friendly to one another. I think it's the same kind of mentality that two Auschwitz survivors that didn't know each other would feel: a vague sense of shared survival, of overcoming incarceration and torture.

Best bits: Holly's body language; Halifax's 'Withnail' coat.
Worst bits: some fuzziness caused by filesize restrictions; disappointing lack of rain.