Surprise! It's another subplot!

As I said in a previous Creator Commentary, I have so many ideas for stories and supporting characters that I feel like I'm not going to get to them all, unless I start dropping seeds for them into the current storyline. So here we are. A spaceship carries a baby towards Earth - I'm sure you can all tell which particular superhero I'm parodying here! Hopefully you're wondering what this particular page will mean for Steamroller Man - that's my intention! A few of you regular commenters have made pretty good guesses regarding earlier story developments, so feel free to make some guesses! Of course, I will confirm or deny NOTHING!!

The plot outline for this page was very simple - a ship flies through space. I was a bit stuck for how to add jokes to that. It's challenging to add comedy to something which is essentially just connective story tissue - like getting a character from point A to point B. In this case there wasn't even a character on the page until the last panel! So I fell back on something I've seen the writers of The Simpsons do in similar kinds of scenarios - sign gags!

Adding signs floating in space didn't occur to me at first because I think I was not thinking "loose" enough, putting mental restrictions and rules on what would "make sense" in space. Thankfully I remembered that I could make this comic whatever I wanted it to be - I was the one making the rules!

The first sign hopefully requires little explanation. The second sign is a reference to a real street intersection in Los Angeles, whose street names seemed quite a propos here. The third sign sprang from the same train of thought - once upon a time, tourists in Hollywood would pass at least one sign advertising street maps of the area with the addresses of famous stars' homes. I'm not sure if this is still happening in this post-pandemic world, but it was once "a thing", and it also fit in with the other two astronomy-themed puns.