Comic Transcripts

[[Other ranks pinstripe uniform with pill box cap, swagger stick and moustache on left talking to smaller gent in suit with hat, walking stick and more luxuriant moustache on right. Outdoor ice skating in background.]]

Uniform: An easy way to picture the size of an acre is that it’s a bit smaller than a football field!

Gent: People always say that like it makes it easier. But it presumes that everyone shares a very particular set of specialized knowledge! See, I don’t watch football! I’ve seen a dozen games in my whole life, and all of them on TV! I don’t have the scale of a football field imprinted in my memory as a unit of measurement!

Uniform: OK, put another way, an acre is just larger than the dish area of the “Mars” Radio Telescope at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California.
Gent: Well why didn’t you just say that to begin with!

{{header: measure up to WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: Come ON, you don’t have to tell me WHERE the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex is}}

#881; In which a Standard is questioned transcribed by in

[[Other ranks pinstripe uniform with pill box cap, swagger stick and moustache on left talking to smaller gent in suit with hat, walking stick and more luxuriant moustache on right. Outdoor ice skating in background.]]

Uniform: An easy way to picture the size of an acre is that it’s a bit smaller than a football field!

Gent: People always say that like it makes it easier. But it presumes that everyone shares a very particular set of specialized knowledge! See, I don’t watch football! I’ve seen a dozen games in my whole life, and all of them on TV! I don’t have the scale of a football field imprinted in my memory as a unit of measurement!

Uniform: OK, put another way, an acre is just larger than the dish area of the “Mars” Radio Telescope at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California.
Gent: Well why didn’t you just say that to begin with!

{{header: measure up to WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: Come ON, you don’t have to tell me WHERE the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex is}}

#881; In which a Standard is questioned transcribed by in

[[Other ranks pinstripe uniform with pill box cap, swagger stick and moustache on left talking to smaller gent in suit with hat, walking stick and more luxuriant moustache on right. Outdoor ice skating in background.]]

Uniform: An easy way to picture the size of an acre is that it's a bit smaller than a football field!

Gent: People always say that like it makes it easier. But it presumes that everyone shares a very particular set of specialized knowledge! See, I don't watch football! I've seen a dozen games in my whole life, and all of them on TV! I don't have the scale of a football field imprinted in my memory as a unit of measurement!

Uniform: OK, put another way, an acre is just larger than the dish area of the "Mars" Radio Telescope at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California.
Gent: Well why didn't you just say that to begin with!

{{header: measure up to WONDERMARK.COM}}
{{alt-text: Come ON, you don't have to tell me WHERE the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex is}}

Come ON, you don't have to tell me WHERE the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex is

#881; In which a Standard is questioned

  — October 23rd, 2012

[ Tags: , , ]       Permalink: https://wondermark.com/c/881/

This comic is dedicated to the engineers at JPL! Yesterday I was lucky enough to get to tag along on a tour my wife organized for her fellow crew members from the TV show Robot Chicken. Mars rover driver Scott Maxwell and his colleagues were kind enough to show us all around the facility! Check it out

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My newest game: Noodle Battle! At PAX!

September 2, 2026 by David Malki !

The past few weeks have been a frenzy of assembling the very laborious, very bespoke first print run of NOODLE BATTLE, the puzzle game I am releasing this weekend at PAX West in Seattle!

PAX has an event called the PNW Tabletop Game Market (Saturday night ONLY), which is a curated selection of short-run games from local designers. As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I applied for a space in this fall’s event mainly as a way to force myself to finish a new game. And here it is!

The drawings are all by Jason Poland, good pal and cartoonist of My Dad Is Dracula. Jason played an early version of this game at Alaska Robotics Comics Camp this spring, and really liked it!

So I said, “Do you want to help me make it?” And so he has! It was his idea to make all the characters fun little animals, and I think it adds a ton of charm.

Because this edition is limited-run, it has been incredibly labor-intensive to make! The boxes and cards were made by a game factory in the usual fashion, but separately. The blank tiles were made by a woodworker dude out of Connecticut. For each game, we have had to:

  • Cut a piece of plastic and install the box window
  • Paint all the tiles, hundreds at a time
  • Apply a sticker to both sides of every tile
  • Apply stickers to the box (we couldn’t get the box back printed in time, so the whole back side of the box is a sticker too)
  • Apply the “Nutrition Facts” sticker, which was a late suggestion by my kid that I just had to run with
  • Fold up the rule sheet (they come from the printer as big strips of paper)
  • Put all the components into the box and seal it all up

I knew it would be a lot of work and would require some inefficient, expensive compromises AND I WAS RIGHT. But the final product is turning out great, which is the important thing!!

I will have 50 copies with me (if all goes well) at PAX, and then between now and the holidays we will be putting together additional copies to round out this first edition.

I will announce additional copies on Patreon first, once they are available online!! And here too, naturally, before long.

You can also sign up here if you’d like me to email you once the game is available online!


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