"How come Hart didn't recognise Candice here, since they had met before?" -Jorge

This isn't really the most interesting answer, but: it was months later, and Candice looked very different! If Fridge/Hart had considered Candice to be someone important, he might have remembered her well enough to realize it was her... but honestly, between their two meetings, I don't think he ever gave her a second thought. He definintely was not expecting to see her again.

Love the backstory on Brain. However, as a geneticist, I can’t help but to wonder at the evolutionary dynamics behind this Highlander-style species. How exactly did Brain and Hart’ species come about in the first place if they must kill each other to survive (and evidently can’t reproduce)? There can be only one!" -KPO

How indeed? *knowing wink*

"In one of your first Q&As, you said that Candice would not be returning (obviously meaning posthumously). But one strange thing [I noticed while] reading through the archive from start to finish in the past couple weeks is that Candice (and her regicide/suicide/exorcism) seems to completely disappear from everybody's vocabulary in Noosehead and beyond -- Sam even cuts himself off from recounting how he first met her when trying to refresh Bonus's memory.

This seems to my eyes like a projection of a deeper emotional trauma on Sam... and since Sam still has never really talked about the Candice incident to anyone since then, it seems like he would have had no opportunity to get over it.

So has Sam ever come to terms with his experience? Or is it possible that you as the author had projected a trauma in your own life onto Candice, which is why her name was never uttered for so long? (Sorry for the attempted psychoanalysis.)" -Samuel

Candice isn't a stand-in for a real life, trauma, no! But it's true... after the original Classic series ended, the subject of Candice was pretty consistently tip-toed around for many years. There are basically two reasons for that!

The first, absolutely, is that Sam doesn't like to talk about it. After all, the end of the Classic story arc is not exactly a great moment for him. He plays no significant role in the defeat of Fridge, and is powerless to help Candice in any way. Really, his presense at those events is ultimately meaningless... he is just a helpless spectator along for the ride.  It is not a big jump to assume that current Sam's obsession with having the power to stop bad things from happening stems partly from how helpless and ineffectual he was during moments like this.

The second is, well... I try not to confuse newer readers by bringing up a lot of references to old stories they might not have read! So, I try to keep to limit them to the details that are specifically relevant. In the Noosehead series, strips that reference the Classic series (like this one and this one) generally leave out Fridge, or only mention him offhand as a sort of non-sequitor joke, because ultimately, a newer reader doesn't need to know about all the crazy demon stuff... the they just need to hear what trauma Sam is running from and why he has to go back. And in the early NMS series, Classic references are distilled even further... now neither Candice nor Fridge are mentioned. Sam doesn't want to talk about that stuff, and the plot doesn't require him to. So it goes unmentioned, and newer readers only learn what they need to learn.

But slowly, over the course of the NMS series, the details of Sam's past have been reintroduced. We've generally (re)learned them via Dev, as she herself has come to know and understand Sam better. Candice is (finally) brought up in these strips, and we start to see how much those earlier events have shaped current Sam's outlook. And now, when it has become clear that Fridge and Candice are both very relevant to the current story, both in terms of character motivation and plot... we arrive at our current flashback chapter and really dig into it!

Now, new readers get to learn exactly what happened, long time readers get to learn that there was a lot more to those events than they originally thought, and we all get to see exactly what it all means for Sam and what he does when he is forced to confront it all. That's the idea, anyway!

That's a wrap for this week, team. Come back on Monday for our next comic!

 

-Sam Logan