Lower-Order Microcosm

It took me the longest time to think of a strip that could appropriately introduce this wonderful object. I can't really imagine Ike inventing anything that isn't a cube with a collection of polygons living on its surface, making even terribler jokes than the Polytopes themselves. With all her wondering and musing about four-dimensional beings and suchlike, it seems only appropriate that she would invent something that allows her to see a world in much the same way that Tess sees the Polytopes universe. The opportunities to use Ike's cube for extensive Polytopes meta-commentary are staggering, which is why I've avoided them entirely so far. 'S'like shooting clay pigeons after they've landed.

I do like the idea of having strips set on Ike's cube. I don't think I'll go so far as to name anyone, or think too hard about how physics and such work on the surface of that cube, but pretty much any time I need to do a really tasteless one-off joke about the Pythagorean Theorem or some such I'll probably toss it to the Gons. I'm not sure whether to call them Gons or 'Gons, really, but as long as it's pronounced the same I really don't care.

Everything here was drawn new for the strip. The cube I am especially proud of. It makes me happy about things generally, and if I was a more fastidious individual I'd go and individually thicken the lines around the smaller cube in the third panel. But I'm not, so don't hold your breath; just sort of imagine that the lines are appropriately thick to suggest walls. Ike also has a new table! It's based extremely loosely on an actual table in the universe today, which I first laid eyes on yesterday. As soon as I saw it, I thought, I can draw that table. I should put it in the comic. Looks unstable, is unstable!

Yeah, today's joke is almost self-referential.