He didn’t think it would, so he tried it out at night. But it worked a charm.

Or I could actually GET ON WITH WHAT I’M MEANT TO BE DOING.

the real reason the talks derailed:

(I’m not happy with this Baxter, not at all, but it’s been such a while since I grappled with him that I thought it better to bodge one out and springboard off its mediocrity back up into the soaring heights of The Fish than fuss forever with an unhappy cartoon. Better out than in. I don’t like: the subject, the words, the posture, the colour and the composition, the chair, the table, the nameplate thing. I do like: the pointer, the fish. If I could say that the whole cartoon is saved by anything at all, it is in the placid disinterest of the fish. Anyway, back in the saddle!)

One of the more pictorially ambitious sequences to date.

Deft, confident, in many ways reminiscent of Van Eyck.