CCCXXXV: Hey, Remember Ash’s Nickname From That One Time?
As a main character, Noah deserved to have his own waking-up-in-bed silhouette sequence. I had been searching for a way to write it into the comic for 9 or 10 chapters by this point. Now all of the regulars have done at least one of these.
Speaking of long-running UTC traditions, the Purple Martins poster is the first time in a while the comic has seen a poster parodying a pop culture entity by altering the trademarked animal. This time, it’s done with the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team.
“Triple-A” is Noah’s nickname for Ash. (Ash’s first, middle and last names all begin with “A”.) Noah only ever used it in the first chapter. Despite being very close friends, the two of them haven’t been seen hanging out together in the series, outside the double date. So, this is just the second time the nickname has come up. I’m insistent upon making it a thing instead of writing it off as “early installment weirdness.”
Ash explains that the connection Morty made on page CCCXXXI had to do with his own remark about the feasibility of using the nanobots on page CCCIII. I wrote Ash’s line on the latter page because I truly had no intention of having the nanobots be Noah’s cure. During the late stages of writing the script for this chapter, though, I ran into a wall trying to figure out a reasonable and believable alternate cure. I ran some ideas by a friend and they convinced me that using the nanobots made the most sense in the end.
