I’m a bit confused here … okay, maybe a bit more than that. Is Honest Ernest responding to Jules Rivera’s narration box in panel 1!? I mean, he’s look at us, not the narration box over his head. But of course, in the comic strip world, the narration box just represents the narrator’s voice, rather than a physical sign, as we see it. However, characters do not normally respond directly to narration boxes. Also, I’m reminded of the Western parody film short available on Youtube: “The Gunfighter”, narrated by Nick Offerman, in which the characters and storyline in the film are definitely affected by the narration and respond to it.

Next, what is this “Leave the Fourth Wall alone” business in panel 2? Clearly, we now have Rivera talking back to Honest Ernest! Okay, at one level, I can appreciate this kind of off-beat, surrealistic humor. It’s like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Pearls Before Swine, when Stephan Pastis puts himself into the strip and interacts with his creations. There are some interactions between characters and narration boxes in other comic strips, but I just couldn’t find an example in time to include here.

Art Dept. I return to one of my earlier hypotheses that Rivera must have been influenced at some part by theater set design, because her trees (as in panel 1) have all the reality and flatness of painted cardboard or plywood. I reckon that if Rivera wanted to carry her surrealistic concept even further, she could have the strip’s characters occasionally acknowledge the fakeness of the trees and other props; even to the extent of moving them so the reader can see the scene better. Okay, I might be taking this way too seriously. But give me credit for not spending time on the rest of the drawing.