1 {scene: The Legacy engine room}
1 Quercus: Mr Spanners, the presence of these time travellers makes me nervous.
2 Spanners: Yes, Quercus. While they're around, the chances are high of creating a temporal paradox and disrupting the space-time continuum, potentially leading to the destruction of the entire universe.
3 Quercus: I was referring to the existence of two Serrons.
4 Quercus: Which in many ways I find even more disturbing.

I was discussing this with some friends today (the day I am writing this annotation, which is about a month ago when this comic goes live). If something happened that actually did destroy the entire universe (and by that I mean everything, including any potential afterlifes that may or may not exist, so after this event your consciousness/soul/whatever you believe in will not exist) and did it in such a way that we had no warning (and thus no time to panic), and fast enough that we couldn't perceive it happening (again, giving us no time to react), then, really, there's no way you'd ever know that it had happened, and no way that you or anyone else could be upset about it for any reason. So, in effect, it wouldn't matter if the universe was destroyed.

So in that sense, it almost does make sense that something relatively minor, like stubbing your toe, say, could be worse than the destruction of the entire universe.

This is a rather philosophical argument, and I'm sure many of you will disagree with it for various reasons. But I also think many of you will see the point I'm making.

---

2020-05-23 Rerun commentary: It's interesting that Spanners' speech is so long that the speech bubble has to overlap the comic panel image slightly. And the pointy tail is almost entirely overlapping the panel image. This is a pretty rare occurrence in Irregular Webcomic!

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if I'd gone the more conventional approach of having white speech bubbles with black borders, fully overlaid onto the images. (I didn't originally because I couldn't figure out how to do it with the image processing tools I had at the time.) I also contemplate changing style to that occasionally, since I now have the image manipulation tools and skills to do it easily enough - but then it would change a fundamental constant of IWC and it simply wouldn't feel the same any more.