The weeks continued to drag on, but all attempts to bring the artist search to a fruitful closure had been stalled. As you know from my update last month, Fargo was hiding from the Koreans in Vegas and somehow had it in his head that the ideal artist candidate so far was a horse.

His repeated and nagging attempts to sell me on the idea of a horse running the feature not only failed to convince me, but over time reinforced my negative opinion of the horse idea in general and this horse specifically. That stupid fly-covered snot factory ate my tape dispenser. ATE it. He won't fit in standard cubicles. He knocked over the water cooler, then kicked down a cubicle wall outside my door. I was trapped for a week.

Fargo's calls from the road -- every night a new hotel and a different alias -- got increasingly frequent and (if you believe it) even more abusive. Finally I decided I'd had enough. So long as Fargo believed a horse was acting as the artistic director for this critically important comic, featured on the front page of GameSpy, I could move on with my life. I staged some incriminating horse photographs --

[READER ALERT! The phrase "incriminating horse photographs" has just boosted our Google Pagerank by 50%. Thank you.]

-- then faxed them to Fargo. "He's very excited about the job," I said, "He expressed his enthusiasm by vomiting up several meters of cellophane tape."

Meanwhile, the REAL artist I had chosen recently expressed some misgivings. "I have to wear -- What?" he asked, standing before me in the front half of the costume while holding a shaggy horse head with ping-pong-ball eyes.

"Just the front half," I explained to him. "I will be the legs."