Fall Apart
Fall Apart
[Various people struggle as the comic disintegrates. Toward the top, people are standing calmly, some holding hands. As the parts of the comic break apart, people try to reach for each other, hold parts together, or curl up into a ball. By the bottom, a Cueball is falling, surrounded by pieces of the comic.]

Despite Randall being enthusiastic about receiving ink pens, his first experiment with them has resulted in a rather bleak comic.
Instead of multiple panels, the entire comic is a single drawing, with an apparent passage of time as we travel down the page. The frame, which represents the world of the characters, gradually disintegrates and leaves them falling helplessly. At the top, we see some people standing alone, apparently happy enough, and a couple. As we descend the page, we see examples of a couple split by a narrow chasm, someone huddled isolated and alone on their own world fragment, a couple desperately trying to hang on to each other, and a single figure falling chaotically and without control.
The comic seems to be expressing what it feels like to someone when a relationship breaks up — their world falls apart, and one of the implications is that the process cannot easily be reversed. In short, it is catastrophic.
The identity of '#pugglewumper Tashari,' the supplier of the pens, is not known. Judging by the use of the hash sign, it is someone with whom Randall communicates in IRC . In fact, 'pugglewump' appears to be an IRC channel. Although hashtags later came to be strongly associated with Twitter , this was not true at the time the comic was drawn.
[Various people struggle as the comic disintegrates. Toward the top, people are standing calmly, some holding hands. As the parts of the comic break apart, people try to reach for each other, hold parts together, or curl up into a ball. By the bottom, a Cueball is falling, surrounded by pieces of the comic.]
