Well, there's the classic favorite of inserting related newspaper clippings, book excerpts, government documents, TV transcripts, and so forth. I did that with my superhero story in Path of the Just and it added probably a thousand words. Helped disguise the fact that the first two thirds of the story is really just two people sitting in a Chinese restaurant, doing first date chatting.

Doonesbury always does cool things like that for their talking-head strips. I dig Doonesbury.

Yeah. It’s interesting, if you watch the evolution of Doonesbury since the 70s, to see how Trudeau gradually started incorporating more and more of these tricks — probably as he learned to draw better.