I won’t explain anything yet, so you can go ahead and be just as confused as Shannon is …

At last!

Those cans with the geometric patterns contain the best thing you can have with pancakes: Russian condensed sweetened milk! (That’s right, only the Russian kind in the classic Soviet-era blue cans is good enough.)

Read more about regional variations of the “favourite seamen’s dish” lobscouse, presumably of Norwegian origin, in England and Germany.

Seawolves, or wolffish, are nice little creatures who eat crab and sea urchins. (Awww.) Their Latin name, Anarhichas lupus, means “climbing wolf”, not “Anarchist wolf”, like I wishfully misread it for a split second.

It’s actually quite fitting to compare Aeron with something wolflike, because one of the many sources of inspiration for his character is Vargen (Wolf) in the Swedish children’s comic Bamse by Rune Andréasson, of which I have probably read every single issue since I was born until we moved away from Sweden when I was nine. At that time, when Rune A. himself still wrote the scripts for many of the comics, it had an obvious Socialist leaning. Vargen, with his troubled past, is my very favourite character in the comic. One of the things Aeron has from him might be the dressing in all black part …

Eva puts Bobik’s hairs in a matchbox that she keeps in her bra (among numerous other things, I would guess) … I don’t know if the comic really conveys that. :o/ But maybe it doesn’t really matter.

(This page was a bit delayed because I kept staring at Eva in the last panel on the previous page and thinking improper thoughts. :3)

Somehow this was really hard, and after redrawing a couple of the panels fifty million times, I’m amazed that I could ink this whole page without screwing it up too much, except giving Willie an ink blot goatee and drawing one of Aeron’s eyes a few millimeters too high up. Whee! Nothing Photoshop couldn’t fix.

Driftwood’s Slavonics lesson #357 is in panel 3. The papakha (a word of Azeri origin) has had a quite turbulent history in Russian military uniforms …
The preferred fur hat for colder regions is called ushanka, which comes from ukho, “ear”.