Though Helen made a minion small,
(Win your boss some bricks!)
He has not plotted her downfall!
(Win your boss some bricks!)

Rise up, Artie!
Against your evil boss!
Show Mell, and raise hell,
And win your boss some bricks!

Crabtree’s death scene is the point where, all those long years ago, Sluggy really ‘clicked’ for me. For the uninitiated, that’s a strip where Crabtree, a nanobot-enhanced power-absorbing villain from the talking ferret’s origin story, has eaten and absorbed the personalities of the military elves from the second Christmas arc, and is defeated by an alien from the Star Trek/Alien parody arc. In late 2000, you just couldn’t get this sort of accumulating, internally consistent world of nonsense from any old internet site.

(Sadly, all I can think of when I read that strip today is how puny and cramped it looks at 1920×1200 resolution. I guess that’s another brick awarded to our author’s foresight for making her strip images 280px tall.)

Ed Gedeon says:

“‘Beetle-bot’ makes me think of Doodles Weaver.  (Who else remembers Spike Jones and his City Slickers?)”

Remember him?! I have three albums of his music! For those not in the know, Jones was the “Weird Al” of his day and the Ur-filker. (And for future reference, the horse’s name was “Feetlebaum”.)

Leon Arnott says: Friday:

“I have to wonder about the verb ‘henching’, often seen in webcomics like this and Nodwick and such. While thinking about it, I looked up the etymology of ‘henchman’, and it’s apparantly ‘from man + O.E. hengest’horse, stallion, gelding.’ I guess that proves it, then – the English language really is horses all the way down.”

To add to that, I read somewhere that the term more specifically refers to Eunuchs (basically gelded men) who, back when it was an accepted practice, were a Queen’s personal servant(s) and were the only men trusted to be present with her in “intimate” settings. (i.e. During her bath.) As the practice died out, they were replaced by “Ladies-in-Waiting”.