The book they're reading is called "Coolness." Originally Moe was going to say his line in the last panel, but for some reason, I figured it would be better if he thought it.
"Weirded out" in the last panel is a reference to the Homestar Runner cartoon "Teen Girl Squad Issue 4."
Moe's dialogue was originally a little bit different. In the first panel he said, "We are." But I thought that this would counter his later line "so instead we're going to play...", so I changed it to "Yeah." Also, his first word in the second panel was "unfortunately." I can't remember why I changed it to "but."
I don't know why I chose 473 as the number of urchins. It just seemed right.
One of my idea sketches for this strip was to actually see the urchins in his tail, with Nemo's face coming into the compartment. But then I thought that would ruin the suspense, kind of like the interior of Snoopy's doghouse, so I changed it back to this.
I was just thinking that it's pretty interesting that, throughout the almost five and a half years of doing this blog, and the almost 1700 posts, I have never used identical titles; each title is unique.
This is the first time I actually drew Gwendolyn's division line. I specifically said "division line" because, in past strips, we have seenherback; but never have we actually seen the division between skin and scales.
Several of those stuffed animals in the third panel are some of the stuffed animals either I or one of my siblings owns. Also, to make it look more like Angry Birds, I put a crown on the whale.
The thing he's holding in the middle panel is a TV remote control. I wasn't sure at first if I should put it in, but then I figured, since Labor Week was ending, he shouldn't just be lying there doing nothing. He should be lying there doing something. (Watching TV counts as doing something, right?)
I thought it would be too much work to actually scramble a cube just for this strip, so I just copied a scrambled cube from the cover of a Rubik's Cube book.