Irregular Webcomic! #1055

1 Starport Control: {over radio} Legacy, our records show you weren't here a week ago. Your last departure was nine weeks ago.
2 Paris: Nine weeks?! Oh, damn, I forgot about the cyberspace time dilation. Any chance the docking bay hasn't been cleaned in that time, so we can still search it?
3 {silent beat}
4 Starport Control: Bring your own contamination suits.

Of course all of you will remember the cyberspace time dilation effect described in #731 and the fact that the time they spent in cyberspace was equal to two months in the real world. So it can't be just a week since they were last at this planet, as Paris claimed in the previous strip.

At least, I know the ones of you who called me on the lack of continuity remember it.

Okay, I goofed. Having discovered the goof, I considered five approaches to fixing it:

Blithely ignore the problem, knowing that most readers didn't catch it.
Perform a major retcon, and edit strip #1050 so that Paris says "nine weeks" instead of "a week", and then claim it was that way all along. I call this the "George Lucas solution".
Quickly scramble to make a new strip explaining the mistake as an in-character mistake made by Paris, and bump all the space strips in my buffer up a slot to make room for the explanation.
Do 3 above, but then claim that I'd intended that little moment of characterisation all along and pretend that the new strip I'd scrambled to make was always part of the plan.
Actually have done this strip beforehand because I really did intend this little moment of characterisation, but then pretend to have made a mistake in continuity and be caught at it, just to mess with your heads.

In the end I went with approach number 5.

2015-03-13 Rerun commentary: The long pull back for the silent beat panel is a good method of showing an awkward silence. And this is a pretty long pull back, as pull backs go.

The land and oceans on Arawne seen in the background bear a superficial resemblance to North and South America, with the Gulf of Mexico on the right, but this is just random coincidence. Quite literally, since I generated the globe render of Arawne using fractal random algorithms in POV-Ray rendering software.