Do You Ever Feel Like a Porcupine in a Hot Air Balloon?

The Periodic Inscrutable by Arthur Trope

Sometimes, when he's late on a deadline, or coming up on a gum graft, or both, which is surprisingly often, Artie says something to the effect of "Do you ever feel like a porcupine just riding along in a hot air balloon?" I never really knew what he meant by it, but for reference, the last time he said it, he'd started his morning with the unpleasant realization that he'd brushed his teeth with Preparation H. I'll spare you the part about where the toothpaste went. Anyway, our dog Milo left us this week. So it's been a tough week. He was a good boy. I was going through the catalog looking for Milo-inspired dog comics this morning, which was harder than it should've been because the tags got corrupted in the file transfers after the platform migration. After two and a half hours, I didn't find as many  dog comics as I expected, but I did stumble across this old, caption-less panel Artie did, I think from when he was in Cabo recovering from his first gum graft, which was around 2016, if I recall. He's a decade older now, but he has the gums of a thirty-five year old. Literally. They used cadaver tissue for the graft. If it was me, I would've let all my teeth fall out. Long story short, I'm a decade older myself now, and I think I'm starting to understand what he meant. -Ed.

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