basis for an entire story-arc, but recognition is never a prerequisite for understanding the strip. Narbonic makes few references to other webcomics, even though this is a fairly common activity within the community. For example, in the story arc "The End", Helen starts making up excuses to leave Dave. The four she gave were that her father killed himself in front of her, her college fiancé tried to rape her, she had Alzheimer's disease, and she suffered "a tragic miscarriage"; references to, respectively, Faye in Questionable Content, Ki in General Protection Fault, Davan's father in Something Positive and Lilah in Ctrl+Alt+Del. Two of the rare occasions on which other webcomics make an appearance are as follows. First, at the end of the initial story arc, a news report implies that most of Helen's escaped giant ur-gerbils were slaughtered by Bun-Bun of Sluggy Freelance (with news reaction by Melonpool's Sammy the Hammy). Second, at the end of the Doppelganger Gambit arc, Garrity draws, in the background of a bar scene, the cast of the webcomic 1/0 in the human forms they received at that strip's end. Major characters Helen B. Narbon, a.k.a. "Beta" The mad scientist who runs Narbonic Labs, Helen is cheerful, optimistic, and, definitionally, quite insane. Her favorite attire is a labcoat worn over jean shorts and a T-shirt reading "evil", with the "i" dotted by a pink heart. Though Helen's gerbil fixation is prominently featured in the strip, her well-justified fear that she will someday become identical to her mother, of whom she is a clone, may more deeply motivate her actions. It is, perhaps, this fear that feeds her second major scientific fascination: the biological underpinnings of mad genius. Eventually, it is revealed that Helen has embarked on an ambitious research project to study just this question. Published under a pseudonym and known to the general mad science community only as the Tinasky Study (a probable allusion to Wanda Tinasky), Helen's project is a detailed, covert study of a "pre-mad" mad genius, who happens to be none other than her faithful technician, Dave Davenport. Mell Kelly Helen's evil intern Melody Wildflower Kelly has long, dark hair and glasses, and usually wears an off-the-shoulder top, a skirt, and tights. While she begins her employment with few evil skills, save a flair for treachery and a rather terrifying passion for weaponry, she eventually learns the value of foresight and