The Ouro Bros and the Neverending Tour

Jeff: Yet another long-standing joke that Jeremy and I have known about has finally come to light. An awesome name like “Balthazar” is stuck with “Stan” as a companion name? Good heavens, no. The phantasmagoric name of “Stathaniel” stands proudly in its stead.

…Then, that name gets hit by a kickball in the glasses, and goes and sits in the bleachers for the rest of gym class.

Jeremy: When we came up with the names of our main characters, we were batting around the idea of having a combination of one complicated name, and one simple name.  I believe the first idea of a name combo that came out of my mouth, following this formula, was that they should be called (jokingly) “Applesauce and John”, which was a sort of inside joke that made it into this strip.  After a time of batting around name ideas (could have been weeks of back and forth, I don’t quite remember), we came up with Balthazar and Stan.

And as many of our brainstorming sessions that devolve into silliness do, at some point, we decided that Stan and Bal’s parents gave them both relatively odd names, but Stan chose to hide his out of embarrassment.  And so arose the name Stathaniel (which was at first Staniel, but thanks to my lovely and intelligent wife, Stathaniel was presented as an even more ridiculous name). And yay for an inside secret finally being presented!