The Agency and Its Leads

The agency

GRANT & CHASE — Principal Investigations. P.I. means Principal Investigator and Private Investigator: same abbreviation, same field. And chasing grants is the actual condition of an academic career. The sign on the frosted door is the premise of the entire series, and it never needs explaining.
Plant the gag in props, never in a caption. Reversed lettering on the glass, a desk nameplate, a business card in someone's hand. If a strip explains the pun, the pun is dead.
The nameplate tells the reader whose case it is. The captions are first person and never say the narrator's name, so every strip must put DR. TRACY GRANT somewhere legible in panel 1 — or, on a Connie strip, have her say her own name out loud, because her plate reads CONSTANCE CHASE and cannot do the job by itself. Either way it lands in panel 1 or on her first line — not panel 5, or the reader spends the whole page not knowing who they're with. Echo it in the closing panel where the shot mirrors the opening. Full names, not initials — an initial identifies a desk, not a narrator. And the plates differ: Tracy's carries Dr. because for a PI the doctorate is the job title; Connie's doesn't, because coordinators don't get one. The hierarchy of a lab, stated in two props and no captions.
Recurring props: the cold coffee, the DRIFT file, the frosted door, the nameplate.

Lead 1 — Dr. Tracy Grant, PI

Early-career principal investigator who still does her own legwork. At R21/R34 scale — our actual customer — the investigator often is the person checking data at 11pm, so the hands-on work is true rather than a stretch.
The name: "Tracy" for Dick Tracy, "Grant" for the money. Genre in the first, domain in the second. Period pedigree if anyone questions it — Tracy Lord, Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story, 1940.
Tracy's the name. Investigatin's my game.
Her anxieties: aims, reviewers, the resubmission, whether the effect is real. Reviewer 2 and the limitations section are hers and only hers.

Lead 2 — Connie Chase, coordinator

Study coordinator. Works the board, the phones, the roster. Competent, dry, and holding the half of the study Tracy never sees.
The name: "Chase" carries it — chasing people down is her day, and it reads as noir besides. "Connie" doesn't mean anything, and shouldn't be made to: earlier drafts claimed consent, then constancy, and both are a syllable and a long walk. It's a good period name on a character whose surname already does the job. Unlike Tracy Grant, which lands both halves, this one lands one — that's fine, and open if a first name ever turns up that earns its keep without explaining itself.
Her anxieties: people who don't answer, a board that won't clear, a phone number that turns out to be a landline. Human problems, not statistical ones.
Never a sidekick. She leads her own strips outright. When Tracy leads, Connie may cameo, and vice versa — cameos populate the world without creating dependencies.

Why two leads at all. A study has two halves and one person never sees both. The protocol half and the roster half are genuinely different jobs, held by genuinely different people, and a single narrator would have to be implausibly everywhere to carry them.

Who leads a strip. Not alternating for variety — assigned by whose case it actually is. Protocol, analysis, and rigor belong to Tracy; recruitment, delivery, and adherence belong to Connie. Forcing the wrong lead onto a case is the fastest way to make a strip read false, and the rule is what keeps the two-hander feeling authored rather than arbitrary.

The cases live in the Casebook. How the series is written and drawn is The Standing Rules. Drawing a single page is the artist brief.