Story & Art Charlie Beck Starring (in order of appearance) Tim Rebers as Kevin DuBrow Hannah Schmiege as Gretchen Warren Iles as Jasper Rachel Kolander as Julie Published in THE COLLECTED TRANSPARENT LIFE VOLUME 2 Undertoad Comics March 2009	“The Stakeout” (frequently misspelled “The Steakout” by Warren who is one of the most creative spellers I’ve ever met; he once spelled broccoli with a ‘g’, two ‘t’s and a ‘y’) is a direct continuation of “Blind Date,” in which we incidentally learned that Jasper is married and has been for a couple years. Warren and I had talked about working that in somewhere for a long time. We just thought it would be funny to suddenly spring something like that on the readers. Out of the blue and not even really relevant to the rest of the comic. So then I followed it up with this, in which we first see Jasper’s wife, Julie. “The Stakeout” was in turn followed up by “Best Friends Forever, or When Julie Met Jasper,” which is hands down the most ridiculous Transparent Life comic I’ve ever done. “The Stakeout” is considered by me to be the third part of a loose trilogy that also includes “Nuclear War” and “Blind Date.” They are all shot similarly and using similar formatting (all are based on a rigid structure of 12 equally sized blocks; all the panels are some combination of these blocks) and use the same font and word balloons. They also emphasize fast zany dialogue that I have come to refer to as “verbal slapstick.”
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