It was a love of precise description that brought them together, but it also tore them apart.

This nerdy little comic is a sort of a riff off something I drew in August using the same banged-up copy of Webster’s 9th for reference. That book is about 30 years old, and my Roget’s model is even older: that one has my mom’s name and “Room 209” written on the first page, and my mom stopped teaching for a long time after I was born, meaning the thesaurus is at least 40. I like the idea of them being an old married couple, but it’s hard to believe they’d really split up. They absolutely go together. They even line up perfectly in juxtaposition on the bookshelf and I’m pretty sure that Roget is going to go back to Webster after taking a few days to think about priorities and remember their shared love of linguistics and wordplay.

I’m not totally sure how the arms are attached. If I were a better cartoonist these books would have more and better extremities and possibly some kind of faces, and Webster would be in a La-Z-Boy, but I need photos for reference because my mind’s eye is more turned toward words than images, and couldn’t quite picture how a hardcover book would fit into a recliner.

It’s probably only funny if you’re the kind of person who reads dictionaries and thesauruses for fun. Which I do. Clearly, there must be others.