Merry Christmas!

Now that we were including Shanna in the narrative, we could start leaking in a few other references to our other works. Hence “Toppfer West,” a reference to Toppfer University, a sequential-arts school from Sketchies. Sketchies and its ragged band of art students was Phil’s and my main project together before GA: I’m not sure if it’s a real thing in Sepia World, but it probably is.

Toppfer U, in turn, was named for Rudolphe Töppfer, a seminal figure in early comics history who deserves more credit than he gets. You can see how an art university might choose to honor him, even if setting up in America meant they had to drop the umlaut.

Less explicable are the guards apparently named for Norton Antivirus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus, unless Carol’s so paranoid that she’s giving her own security team pseudonyms so no one targets them. Which would be a nice parallel to Shanna’s subterfuge here, I suppose. At least their names are pretty analogous to their function and efficiency.