Soup the Comic Strip by Alun Clewe
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Comic strip for October 21 2023.
PANEL ONE: The high priestess faces the champion. HIGH PRIESTESS: ...Both riders traveled for six hours a day, and rested the remainder, except the first day, when the second rider traveled for only two hours. PANEL TWO: Close on the high priestess's eyes. HIGH PRIESTESS: How long after the first rider set off did they meet? PANEL THREE: Close on the champion, looking blankly. PANEL FOUR: The champion bites his lip in thought. PANEL FIVE: Still close on the champion. CHAMPION: Two days and twenty-four minutes. PANEL SIX: Close on the high priestess. HIGH PRIESTESS: Wrong! The correct answer is "Never, because the first rider was set upon and eaten by a mardinore and the second was turned into a pair of breeches by a capricious wizard"! PANEL SEVEN: The champion glares at the high priestess in frustration. CHAMPION: Well now how the heck was I supposed to guess that? HIGH PRIESTESS: You weren't. We're evil. We don't play fair.
October 21 2023

Dang it, yet again I didn't get around to posting this commentary before midnight, and I still haven't gotten around to fixing that glitch where by default strips are sometimes given the commentary text from the first strip if not overridden, so until almost ten this morning (PST) the commentary for the first strip was showing under this strip. Sorry; I've really got to get around to getting the commentary uploaded on time. Well, at any rate, it's doubtful anyone was affected by this, because I haven't really got the word out about this comic and I don't think I have any readers anyway. I have no idea how to get the word out about the comic. I am not good at publicizing myself. I am not good at a lot of things.

(And of course when I refer to posting the strip commentary that also applies to the other strip-specific text—the title text that shows up when you hover over the strip; the invisible transcript that's there mostly for screen readers—but from now on rather than my specifying that every time let's just tacitly take for granted that whenever I refer to posting the commentary it's assumed to refer to that other text as well.)

For what it's worth, assuming there was no pertinent information missing between the last strip and this one, and assuming certain conditions not explicitly stated in the problem but reasonably inferred (such as that the riders set off at the same time each day), the champion's answer to the question is actually correct. Or would be, if the cultists weren't cheating. So apparently he's not bad at math.

On an unrelated note, I really don't like how the high priestess / princess looks in the penultimate panel here, and I'm not crazy about how she looks in the first panel either. But for some reason overall she was just one of the characters, if not the character, I had the most trouble drawing consistently. I feel like she looked like a totally different person almost every time I drew her. Bleh.