Theirs is a simple species.

This comic belongs to The Man, as in, it’s his concept. I wrote the words and drew the picture, but the particular gag is his idea. Go, The Man! Just because I’m the funny one in the relationship doesn’t mean that he can’t be funny some of the time.

The alien zoo, of course, is not The Man’s, or mine. I think everyone with a tick of imagination has thought about the alien zoo hypothesis. I’m sure I fantasized about what that would be like long before I ever read Slaughterhouse Five. My conception, of course, never involved handheld electronics.

Obviously, we don’t wear clothes in alien zoo.

As for the aliens, I don’t know if I succeeded or not. The Man’s pitch included the phrase “Gary Larson-esque” and I could have drawn stereotypical aliens, grays, or blobs with one one eyeball on a stalk sticking out of their head or something like that, but I’ve always felt that if we meet aliens, we won’t necessarily recognize them as such right away. They might not have bilateral symmetry, or eyes, or limbs. The problem there, I saw right away, is that without SOME human feature, we don’t recognize them as alive. So I had to give them eyes and appendages, at least. Then, because they’re at the zoo, I gave 1 kid a giant stupid cup of the alien equivalent of sugar water, that it’s sucking on instead of looking at the animals, and then I gave another kid a cute human T-shirt, because obviously humans are going to have some fans, even if they’re not pandas or elephants. And then the third kid would have a balloon, but since it’s an alien kid, it’s got a lightning bolt on a string.

The alien parent is fortunate: it possesses sufficient arms to protect all its young at once.