“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”–George Eliot
A famous use of the phrase [“Indian Summer”] in American literature is the title of Van Wyck Brooks New England: Indian Summer (1940), chosen to suggest inconsistency, infertility, and depleted capabilities, a period of seemingly robust strength that is only an imitation of an earlier season of actual strength.–Wikipedia
Hi folks! Not a heckuva lot to be said about today’s strip. Credit TB with getting around to portraying Les and Cayla actually doing couple stuff and enjoying one another’s company. Of course, Les has to ruin everything by expressing his desire to live another 5,490 years.
The strips for the rest of the week have not appeared online, so Monday’s post will be a placeholder. going live at midnight. Pray for a Les-less story arc!
Son of Stuck Funky 
I was reminded of the sequence where Les originally proposed to Cayla, which was a bunch of strips where they were wandering in a park while he was blathering about Lisa and her cancer. Compositionally, it was almost identical to this strip. So identical, in fact, that I was waiting for Les to mention Lisa somewhere.
That isn’t something you want your readers doing, Mr. Batiuk, and it’s not something you want to be reminding them of.
Les manages to find the downside of a perfect day…that there aren’t enough of them. Way to go, asshole. And by the way, Cayla, all “indian summer” days are by definition warm, which is why the “summer” part is in there. Moron.
My concern is that we never actually saw Summer and Keisha leave, which means they could still be there. Sorry, but it’s a real possibility.
Les’ expression is not so much “I’m lucky to be with her” as it is “She’s lucky to be with me.”
I have a strong feeling Batiuk originally wanted Les’s answer to be “Lisa”, and the last panel to just be silence.
I’d say that’s crazy but the two million thing is odd. It just doesn’t feel like you would naturally come up with the number.
Anyway this actually is a decent strip. I don’t really expect it to be the new norm, but the next time Ken McApologist complains that I criticize everything regardless of merit I’ll point this one out.
And assuming that Summer and Keisha are gone. Really the only reason they were there at all was to listen to Cayla’s story and then directly tell the audience that Les has grown as a character. I’ll go back to my own imagination where I imagine the two developing as characters at college, Summer starting to gain the respect of her team through her sheer determination to succeed and Keisha directly forcing some covertly racist jerk to back off.
I kind of home Summer and Keisha are still there, because that means Les and Cayla just blew them off to go on their walk.
Hope, not home.
Cayla has her arm around the arm of the man she loves. Les has his hands in the pockets of the man he loves.
Again, Batiuk ruins something owing to his failure to realize what a smarmy and entitled ass Les is when he isn’t being baffled by the bleeding obvious or stunned into silence by the need to make easy decisions.
@spacemanspiff, i think you’re on to something:
Is the leaf in the masthead the first non-animal figure to appear there?
I was going to say “non-sentient” but I knew the answer to that would be “No, of course not. There’s never been anything sentient in that space.”