These weren't actors playing the characters, nor the characters playing themselves. It's the characters in a fourth-wall-breaking conference room. Back when it started Unlike Minerva would take time off from the main storyline if something amused me.
That table is shaped like Peekaboo, the Kitten from Rose is Rose (which Pat Brady draws). Used entirely without permission. I recall emailing Pat Brady about it and getting a polite response which didn't say very much (because really, what can you say?). I think he said it was nice that I liked his comic, or such.
I believe that Peter's actions were the artist's idea. It took me a while to figure out how to give proper direction for action. I'm glad Erika added that because otherwise it's a talking heads comic, all week long.
There are at least ten times as many webcomics now as there were back when this strip aired in 1999. Probably fifty times as many. And just as many comic strips, because comic strips never die. It's a ridiculous concept, but I have to wonder how many jokes there are and if we ever will run out of new ones.
This strip was written before the comic started running, so we didn't actually get any such mail. It was a good pretext, though. In all honesty, that comeback isn't particularly new or snappy. And if you start saying that what you're doing isn't very good, you run the risk of people agreeing with you.
"2032 - Housewives shock in blue" is from "What in the World", by the Dukes of Stratosphear. I'm not sure anyone got the reference. I probably gave instructions about who that was in the future. I don't remember them, though. I had a few other comics written that flashed forward for a panel or two, but that concept got too complicated to justify itself. Anyhow, yes. Marmaduke will go on forever due to sheer inertia, as will Al Capp. As of the time of this writing, they've just surpassed 20,000 comics about how damn big that dog is; I mean, there has to be a limit to how many jokes can be made from that concept, and there has to be a limit to how many concepts there are.
The idea being that any Snuffy Smith comics were pretty much interchangeable. The comic, in retrospect, doesn't really say that. Hopefully it implies that because it's the only way the joke makes any kind of sense.
The Sunday comic was drawn by Adam Greengard. At the time, he was doing a comic called No Outlet, which has, unfortunately, disappeared from the Internet entirely. I believe he added Brisbane's joke in the third panel; that's not like the bad jokes I gave Brisbane in the past, at least. This comic got put into the revised, post-reboot archive because I liked it and, unlike the rest of the week, it fit the context
The Conference drawn by Erika Rosengarten, Adam Greengard