The Descending Colon
 
“This one started with me overhearing a conversation at a party. Someone was talking about a hospital stay and the phrase “descending colon” just popped out. I walked around the rest of the evening repeating “descending colon .. descending colon ...” in my head while smiling and trying to talk about the stock market. As soon as I got home, I scratched out the idea in my sketchbook with a little diagram blocking it out. The next day, I looked at it and it seemed a little more than a pun. But the more I rolled it around, the phrase “I’m having problems with the descending colon” came to me and it seemed to elevate the whole idea. I thought the drawing would be easy but I’m an idiot. I drew the first draft with the escalators criss-crossing like an X. That made the whole pie thing just physically impossible. So I scrapped the whole thing and went back to the basic simple drawing you see here. I actually have no idea if that’s what a colon looks like but it has a smug little character to it. And I kept the characters sort of small so you have to kind of discover the pie before the whole joke comes together.”