Aftershadowing…

So I have a confession regarding this week’s comic. I’ve had the idea of it in my head a long time because hey, there are these tacky things called “truck nuts” (spelling can vary depending on who’s trying to trademark them) which are basically oversized novelty plastic testicles you hang off your truck’s rear hitch so anyone behind you on the road gets a face full of big ol’ balls bouncing around. So of course I wrote that Chuck had scavenged a pair and he’d have them proudly hanging off of the ranch’s wagon.

Problem being that in all our recent showings of the wagon, I hadn’t been paying attention to that particular bit of continuity and so no nuts were present. This wasn’t a matter of awkwardness, believe it or not, even though you might think so with the idea of turning to your wife/artist and hollering across the room that she forgot to draw the balls on the truck. We’re well past that point of the relationship. No, it was just me forgetting, flat out. It was just a background detail anyhow, not something we’d called attention to.

But no worries! I could still reference them and just have it be that they fell off or got shot off or met some other such vague fate at some vague point between their first appearance and now. The continuity of that appearance would thus be preserved and I could even make a new joke out of it. I’m a genius.

Out of curiosity though I decided just a couple days ago to peruse our archives for the first appearance of the truck nuts, and discovered something…

…they’d never been shown. Ever. Maybe they were in a draft of a script that never made it on the page, or maybe I’ve just had it in my head all these years. Wouldn’t that be nuts (har har)?

But welp, Dawn had already been drawing and as before noted it was not a particularly crucial plot point. So I’ve violated the principles of foreshadowing. I have no Chekhov’s Ballsack to point back to, only the informed speech of characters that yes, at one point they were there but are now gone. Obviously this was not the work of the Huachucas since it has been so since the truck wagon first appeared in Episode Four, but hey, Oscar and Chuck don’t know that. Could have just as well been Suzie surreptitiously performing some vehicular emasculation prior to the cameras getting a chance to broadcast it.

These are the webs I weave, sometimes out of cleverness and sometimes out of mild desperation. And sometimes, that’s a fine, fine line…