The Return of the Human Barbie Doll

Okay, before I get underway with today's rant, I have a quick public service announcement.
My girlfriend Mary, who co-writes this comic with me, is a photographer and blogger in her own right. This year, on August 6th, she's taking part in Blogathon, which, far from being a 21st-Century version of the name 'Jonathan', is a charity drive built around blogs. Mary can explain much better than I:
"Blogathon is a way for the “bloggers” – people who keep diaries, news feeds, moblogs, webcams, or other content online – to give something back to the community by staying up for twenty-four hours straight to raise money for a charity of their choice.
"I’ll be blogging at my writing journal Mental Yoga, which anyone on my RSS feed can follow, and I’m blogging for a great cause. All funds raised by my blogging will go to the CBLDF: The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The CBLDF is a great charity whose constant defence of the First Amendment rights for comic book writers, artists, and shop owners is even more important in the increasingly Orwellian America we live in. They are the last hope for many small comics and shops who would be powerless against the government.
"You can follow the progress of my 24 hrs of blogging madness by subscribing to my feed or adding joellevand_rss to your LiveJournal friends list. Or, you know, actually checking http://journal.beautifulliar.net every hour.
"If you want and have some extra cash, you can even sponsor me."
As a bonus incentive for helping out the charity, anyone who sponsors Mary's 24-hour Blogathon will get a limited edition Shit Happens button badge and (I can exclusively reveal, in the words of the Daily Mail) a Shit Happens sketch, drawn by your overworked artist and signed by both my blog-girl and my own cramped, twisted hands. To get in on the action, drop Mary an e-mail after filling out the sponsorship page and we'll sort you out with the goodies. (Erm, the badge and sketch. Not Bill Oddie, Tim Brooke-Taylor or Graeme Gardener, I'm afraid.)

Okay, onto the commentary.
We kicked around a lot of ideas for this script before getting on with it. A lot of different ideas for an ending joke were rejected as too obscure (we have so many private in-jokes about these comics, we're never sure if anyone else would get them) until one of us threw out the idea that Kali is quite poor at spelling and grammar.
Thematically, as Mary pointed out and was rather adamant on, this strip is very important as a full cycle for Kali. When she first came to the Smokestack, it was the last hurrah of the 'old' Kali, since she underwent a compete personality shift into a major bitch after her eye was taken out by the Northolt Fraternity. In particular, Mary pointed me towards this strip from the first Milton Hoight arc in which Kali is first given her job as a journalist for the Smokestack -- and this strip brings us full circle as she loses that same job. Whereas before she and Heidi had a loathing, now there is some form of mutual respect between the two, whether explicit or not -- they both have reasons for disliking Ormrod, and that's more basis for friendship than some people ever have.