30,000 Feet of Uncomfortable

Artist's Comments:
Here is the story I hinted at yesterday...

While I was on the plane I took to working on the next comic. As I put it together, my new single-serving friend - a small Peruvian woman in her mid 40's who spoke little to no English - watched me intently. Perhaps she saw me as the "young artist" and felt I was therefore more approachable; I'm not sure, but she seemed to grow fond of me far too quickly.

It's somewhat unusual to have a captive audience while I draw. Perhaps it was because I was drawing on my tablet (which she and a number of other people saw as a modern wonder) or she may have just been quietly judging my work, but she was attentive to every detail of the creation of Black Vatican #9. A number of times during the flight she tapped the bottom right area on my screen where Windows keeps it's clock, asking silently about the time.

We had a number of small, broken conversations as well. My Spanish is terrible, and her English was not much better, so we ended up communicating mostly with hand movements that were decidedly not ASL. At one point in the flight, after the now familiar finger tap, she decided it was time to know about my marital status (thankfully, not for herself). After a few moments of strange communication, I indicated I was single by pointing at my bare ring finger and shaking my head vigorously. This, it seems, was not the proper answer.

To her mind, if I was not in a relationship, then surely I was looking. In an attempt to help me narrow my search, she pointed at the female flight attendants and numbered them - "uno, dos, tres..." - then with a somewhat rudimentary grab-and-hump sign, indicated that she wanted to know which of them I found to be the most attractive.

I answered too quickly the first time, embarrassed that despite the language, culture, and age barriers - never mind that we just met - the one topic we communicated easily on was who I felt like screwing. After that first, hasty decision she scolded me like an eight-year-old who has been caught looking at his father's Playboys, so I tried again. This time I took more care, looking over each woman slowly, while wearing the face one makes while inspecting a race horse. She was more pleased with my selection and told me so.

As we were debarking, she decided that we should keep in touch [shudder]. She told me her name (Angelica Something Latina Sounding) and then asked for mine. I hesitated for a moment, then smiled broadly and said, "I'm Reverend Linus - look me up on MySpace."

Reverend's Comments:
Well, that explains all the Latina Mile High Club MILF pr0n advertisements in my inbox - and here I was, blaming Benedict for those...