In January 1993, after turning in the strip for that newsletter, Tere and Linda asked me for a little favor.  The Boulton and Park Society had this little social meeting that was capped off by the pretty symbolic "midnight eating of the sausage."  No, really.  I'm so not making this up.  At midnight, they would all gather around the table, and symbolically carve up a three foot kiolbasa sausage, and serve it around.  

Well, rumor among the other groups in Texas were that we were some kind of wierd pagan coven doing this symbolic castration and initiating members with it.  Like the Masons do.  

So Tere and Linda asked me to do a set of strips about the midnight sausage dinner to help explain it to the other members and groups.  The first appeared in April 1993.  I'm not sure if I managed the whole explanation, but it made for some good reading if you ask me:

Seeing that this was going to be the first real introduction for Carrie and Allyson, I decided to make sure all the intro stuff was here.  They both said their names, there's a reference to them being roomies.

And then there's Irving.

Irving is probably the single most popular character in Closetspace.  And he's never appeared in ONE episode.  That's about to change though, but that's another story altogether.  Irving is the Irving personification of our three foot kiolbasa sausage, and I swear to you, on a stack of Bibles, that I was not hopped up on any kind of goofballs when I drew him up. 

Again, this episode has been rescanned and cleaned up from the Institute archives.