The Standing Rules — The Casebook

The voice

Must hold

The voiceover never winks. The comedy is her commitment to the bit.
One tell per caption, and only what a PI has actually lived.
The overrun runs one clause past sense. Never three.
Affectionate, never contemptuous.

Why, and the finer points

The gap is the engine. The voiceover is always deadly serious; the stakes are always small and administrative. If a caption winks at the reader, it's wrong — the comedy is her total commitment to the bit, never a joke she's in on.
The tell — a true, hyper-specific detail from academic life that turns absurd the moment it's isolated. Never an invented absurdity: if a PI hasn't personally lived it, cut it. This is the recognition laugh, and it's what tells the reader we're one of them. Build it by escalating — general setting → domain detail → dry number → hyper-specific fragment tacked on after the sentence should have ended.

Conference room → consent form → all eleven pages → including the optional saliva sample.

Reviewer 2 is the exemplar — it closes The Quiet Participant. One tell per caption; never stack them.
Card and table vocabulary (case 04's register, available to any case that wants it): the deal · the cut · a stacked deck · a full deck · the bottom of the deck · palming · a force · Lady Luck · a raw deal.

Small blind / big blind is the one worth saving. A blind is money you commit before you see anything — which is allocation concealment — and blinds come in sizes, which is masking: the clinic sees assignments already made, the PI sees nothing at all. Two people at the same table, blind to different degrees. Best home is a script with room to explain who can see what, not a caption.
Repeat the slang on purpose. When a noir word has already been used in an earlier case, reusing it is a feature — the reader is learning the dialect alongside us, and the second and third appearances are where a word stops being decoration and becomes the narrator's actual vocabulary. Sings (the canary in case 01, the fourth card in case 04) is the model. This applies to genre slang only: repeating a tell, a metaphor or a plot turn is still a tic, because those get their power from being specific and used once.
Phrases beat nouns. "The no-cost extension" is a tell. "We spent four days on the acronym and about eleven minutes on the aims" is a better one, because it carries a scene. Bank nouns, but write phrases.
The strongest tells have a number in them. Ninety-one percent of fifty-nine. Eleven grants at five percent each. All eleven pages. The specificity is the joke — a vague version of any of these is just an observation.
A tell is not a title. A tell needs to be true and specific. A title also needs a second, genre-compatible meaning — which is why Adverse Events works and No-Cost Extension doesn't.
Test a tell on someone inside the field but outside the specialty. If it needs explaining, it's out — no matter how true it is. "Lost to follow-up" is a perfect description of this series and was cut for exactly this reason.
The bank. Nouns to build phrases from:

the optional saliva sample · Reviewer 2 · the no-cost extension · a biosketch last updated in 2019 · a data sharing plan written in ninety minutes · revise-and-resubmit · an IRB amendment for a typo · buying a laptop in September because the fiscal year ends · the $25 gift cards and the tax paperwork they generate · scored just outside the payline · a shared drive folder called FINAL_v3_USE_THIS · the co-investigator on eleven grants at five percent each · certifying effort percentages nobody has ever tracked · "in preparation" on a CV for three years · an email from your chair with the subject line "Quick question" · a REDCap project somebody built in 2019 and left · the recruitment flyer with the tear-off tabs

Phrases already spent, so don't respend them: four days on the acronym and eleven minutes on the aims · the answer you give, the one about contributing to the evidence base · ninety-one percent of fifty-nine · the report lists who reported · who counts the rows? · you people rotate · a monitor visit that took a year off my life · a limitations section nobody will ever read · the machine on four
The overrun — the metaphor that runs one clause past where it should have stopped. One clause, not three. Plausible, then a step too far, then stop. This is the delivery laugh, and its failure mode is length: cut the tail before it turns into a list. A reader fills in the blank better than a caption box can.

I stared at it the way a raccoon stares at a motion-sensor porch light.
Tell and overrun are different tools. A weak tell is one the reader hasn't lived. A bad overrun is one that runs three clauses instead of one. Diagnose them separately — most flat lines are one or the other, rarely both.
Slang is the costume; the research detail is the load-bearing wall. When a line has to choose between period patter and domain specificity, keep the domain.
Affectionate, never contemptuous. It recognizes a shared experience; it never implies the reader is doing their job badly. That decides whether she forwards it to her PI.
Comic only Panel 6 loosens — the radio-serial sign-off. Everywhere else the voice is clipped and committed. In the button it relaxes and half-addresses the audience: contractions, "I guess," colloquial grammar. The only panel where the register softens, which is what makes it feel like an ending.

The two surfaces

Must hold

A comic page never inherits the drama’s shape — it finds its own tension.
Nothing in an episode is ever solved by software.
A case card carries only what both surfaces share.
Participant 31, every time, and nobody ever remarks on it.

Why, and the finer points

Radio only The radio era is paper-primary and never dated. Not "pre-computer" — push back far enough to remove the computers and you lose the vocabulary the comedy runs on. IRBs are 1974; the CONSORT flow diagram Connie fills in during The Invisible Line is 1996. The setting that works is the late nineties, never named: CONSORT and IRBs exist, answering machines are ordinary, and a computer is furniture you walk to rather than something that hands you an answer.

Practical test: a computer may be the crime scene, never a convenience. Where the machine is the case — the thing a number was typed into, the status that was accurate and useless — it belongs on stage, and The Perfect Delivery's revelation needs a paper card held against a screen, because the transposition happened between them. What it may not be is an oracle you ask for facts that paper could have given you. Otherwise reach for drawers, envelopes, card indexes and files, which all make sound where a database query doesn't. No smartphones, and no jokes that date the decade in either direction. The comic is present day and has screens; the radio has paper. That contrast is the series, not an inconsistency.
A beat sheet is the radio version. The comic is a different shape. Not the same story with one panel swapped — in the present day the product names the cause, and an investigation can't survive being handed its answer. So a comic page never inherits the drama's four suspects; it finds its own tension. Three strategies so far, all proven: flashback, where the disaster happened before the platform existed (The Quiet Participant); near miss, where the page is present tense and the horror is what she was about to do, with nothing actually lost (The Invisible Line); and half saved, where the damage is already running and part of it is gone for good by the time anyone notices (The Perfect Delivery — six weeks lost, six weeks left). Pick one per page and never run the same one twice in a row.
A case card summarizes neither surface — only what both share. The strip is for a present-day buyer and discreetly shows a real feature doing its job. The episode is set in no particular year, is never solved by software, and earns its authority by not being about us — the education is the point and the argument for the platform is left for the listener to make. So a card written from the strip will be an advertisement and a card written from the episode will describe an instrument we sell. Neither is the case. The index entry gets the invariant: the trouble, the mechanism, and what it cost somebody. If a sentence on a card could be falsified by reading one of the two artifacts, it belongs on that artifact and not here.
Comic = now. Radio = then. The strips are present-day, where the platform exists. The radio dramas are set in Tracy's DRIFT era, before she had any of it. Same continuity, and the strip's flashback row is literally the show's back catalog.
The comic resolves with the product; the radio drama never does. A strip is marketing and may show the alert firing. An episode is a service to the field, and nothing in it may be solved by software — the case closes because she changed.
Radio only Both must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A drama that stops so a guest can finish it isn't a story. The guest widens the case from one study to the field; they never complete it.
The strip names the lore; the drama unpacks it. A comic panel has room for one clause — "it's been two years since DRIFT" — and it reads as texture. The radio version has room for the whole joke: "The DRIFT trial. Daily Routines for Improved Follow-Through. We spent four days on the acronym and about eleven minutes on the aims." Every piece of lore gets used twice, at two compressions.
Studies get acronyms, never surnames. Trials are named by tortured backronym — the letters first, the words reverse-engineered — and everyone knows it and nobody says so. That's a tell in itself, and the acronyms accumulate across the series as a running joke the audience gets better at. Surnames and place names belong to cohorts and registries, not to somebody's first R21.
Participant 31, every time. Whatever the study, whatever the case, the person at the center of it is number thirty-one — and nobody in the world ever remarks on it. The moment a character says "it's always thirty-one" it stops being a running gag and becomes a bit. It's a joke that only exists for someone reading all eight.

Why that number: in a sixty-person study, 31 is the exact middle of the roster — which is precisely where The Invisible Line says things go to be forgotten. Early numbers get attention, late ones get chased, and the middle is where a person becomes a row. It's also 13 backwards, for anyone who wants it.

On screen it reads 031; spoken, it's thirty-one.
Spend tells deliberately. A tell used in a strip and again in its episode reads as a rhyme across media. The same tell in two different cases reads as a repeat. Track them.
Radio only The sponsor gets one line, near the very end, in the announcer's voice — and the guest is never asked what software they use. The show's authority comes from not being about us. Only the sign-off gag comes after it, deliberately: the joke is the reward for sitting through the credits and the ad, so it has to be the last thing anybody hears.
Radio only The announcer's opening and closing are fixed copy. Only the case title, the cameo credit and the rotating sign-off clause change between episodes.

Opening: Adverse Events. From the case files of Dr. Tracy Grant, who writes the protocol, and Connie Chase, who makes it happen. · The story you are about to hear is fiction. Any resemblance to your last study is purely coincidental and entirely predictable. · The Case of the ———.

Closing: This has been The Case of the ———. Then, over the outro music, the cameo credit, the sponsor line, and last of all And even though [CLAUSE] whenever they hear us: this is Adverse Events. No host-and-guest banter — the sign-off is announcer copy only.

Three things not to undo. The disclaimer declares fiction rather than asserting truth — Dragnet could claim truth because it dramatized real case files; ours are composites, and every draft that claimed truth needed an escape hatch. There is no comma before "and entirely predictable"; the run-on is the timing, and a pause telegraphs the joke. And the epithet splits the two leads on who writes the protocol versus who makes it happen — never on who runs the study or who does the science, both of which coordinators would rightly hear as saying the work is somebody else's. Owning the protocol is uncontroversially the PI's; everything after that belongs to both of them.
Radio only The sign-off gag, and how to write more of it. Modelled on Car Talk's "…whenever they hear us say it: this is NPR." The engine is a self-deprecating concession followed by a neutral institutional ID, and it has three requirements. The tag must concede nothing — an earlier draft ended "it is now in peer review," which is a claim, so every clause had to be an obstacle to peer review and most weren't. "Whenever they hear us" is the hinge: without it the line is a plain non-sequitur rather than a joke about this show. And the clause is always a rejection of the program by someone qualified to judge it, never a general grievance about research — the point is that everyone competent has condemned it and it announces itself anyway. Adverse events being real trial vocabulary means the tag also reads as a verdict on what you just heard.

Every clause is present tense, because "whenever they hear us" governs it. A past perfect ("has determined," "has ruled") fights the hinge and reads as a one-time event rather than a standing verdict.

The bank: Reviewer 2 recommends rejection without review · the IRB classifies this as greater than minimal risk · the data safety monitoring board recommends we stop · the participants would like it noted that they did not consent to any of this · the grants office rules this an unallowable expense · the biostatistician points out that our sample size is one · the journal desk-rejects it in under ninety minutes · the university would prefer we clarify that these views are our own · the reproducibility working group cannot replicate it · the program officer asks which specific aim this addresses · the institutional repository declines to assign it a DOI · our own communications office will not promote it · the compliance office requests a copy for the file · the ethics board asks whether listeners were debriefed afterward.

The announcer speaks in the present day even though the drama does not. He already reads a sponsor line for a company that exists now, so REDCap, two-factor and language models are all fair game in his mouth — and still forbidden inside the scenes, where the late-nineties rule holds.

The cast & the ethics

Must hold

She solves it. The software is the break in the case, never the hero.
Never dramatize a failure of the product.
The participant is a person with a life, never a data point.
Every strip reads cold. No strip may depend on another.

Why, and the finer points

Names are puns that read as names first. Tracy Grant, Connie Chase, and the statistician Randy Miser — which at conversational speed is randomizer, a joke that only exists out loud and so has to be read at pace, never leaned on. Banked: Fisher for a later methodologist (R.A. Fisher invented randomized design — an allusion rather than a pun, so it wants a different character), and Randy's first live introduction, saved for whenever he's more than a voicemail: "The name's Miser. Randy Miser. But my friends call me Lucky."
Connie says "Tracy" to her face and "Dr. Grant" in narration. Formal about her, familiar to her — she's a partner at the agency, not staff, and a coordinator who calls her "Doctor" across a desk reads as hierarchy the series doesn't have. The nameplates carry the title contrast; the dialogue shouldn't repeat it.
Two leads, assigned by whose case it is. Tracy takes protocol, analysis, and rigor; Connie takes recruitment, delivery, and adherence. Never force the wrong lead onto a case — it's the fastest way to make a strip read false.
She solves it. The software is the break in the case, never the hero. It's the informant who calls at the right hour, not the detective.
Never dramatize a failure of the product. The catastrophe always belongs to the old way, in the past, on a named study that predates the platform. The present-day case is always caught early.
The participant is a person with a life, never a data point. Every resolution lands on a human outcome, not a metric.
Procedural, not serial. Every strip is self-contained and readable cold — Dragnet, not a soap opera. The throughline is the character: same heroine, same office, same voice. Readers hit these in whatever order the site gives them, so no strip may assume another has been read.
Running references are fine; dependencies are not. The DRIFT trial can recur as her one unsolved case, the way every detective has one. But if a first-time reader landing on strip six loses anything by not knowing it, the reference is doing too much work — cut it back to flavor.

The page Comic only

Must hold

Six panels, or nine when the page needs the room.
The tonal break lands on a row break; the last row is the bright one.
Climax second-to-last, button last.
Never end on a capability claim.

Why, and the finer points

Six panels, 3 across × 2 down — or nine, 3 × 3, when the page needs the room. Six is the default and most pages use it. Go to nine whenever the case actually wants it: a false lead to clear, dialogue that won't compress, artwork that deserves the space, or a deliberate Sunday layout for its own sake. The Stacked Deck runs nine because clearing a wrong suspect costs a full beat and the real answer still has to land — the trial · the case and the break · the answer — but that's one reason among several, not the test.
Whichever grid, the rows are the act structure. Two rows or three, the tonal break lands on a row break and the last row is the bright one — so the eye carriage-returns into the light. That's the constraint the panel count is serving; a page that breaks mid-row has bought space and spent the structure.
Most pages are present tense. The trouble comes from the world — a landline, a dead battery, a participant's life — not from the past and never from the product. Only reach for a flashback when the pain is genuinely historical, as on Page 1.
If a page does not shift time, prove it. A near-miss page runs a few minutes end to end, but a reader arriving from a flashback page is trained to read row 1 as the past. The counter-signal is a carried object — the coat and bag in The Invisible Line, the pen and withdrawal form in The Perfect Delivery. It enters early, stays in frame across the row break, and changes state at the end. One object, tracked in every panel, is the whole device.
If a page does shift time, label it. Three redundant signals so none has to work alone: a yellow place-and-time caption in the corner ("TWO YEARS BACK" / "TONIGHT"), a double frame on flashback panels that goes single in the present, and a warmer sepia that drops on the return. Name the old study out loud too, so it can't be confused with the present case. Reserve spiked bursts for emphasis and sound — a reader parses a jagged shape as a noise, not a date.
Noir dissolves on contact with the product. Roughly half the page noir, one hinge panel where the first purple appears, the rest bright — three/one/two on a six, and five/one/three on The Stacked Deck's nine. Capping the parody at about half a page is what keeps it fresh across eight.
Climax second-to-last, button last. The resolution happens at 5 of 6 — 8 of 9 — and the reader infers the rest; the final panel is the aside, the moral, the laugh. Never put the emotional payoff last: it leaves nowhere for the joke to go.
Never end on a capability claim. The button undercuts the product slightly. "Some things software just can't fix." That's the beat that keeps the page from reading as an ad, and the only place self-deprecation belongs.

The look Comic only

Must hold

Black, white and brand purple. Nothing else.
No color anywhere until the product appears.
No real UI inside a panel. (One exception: The Corkboard.)

Why, and the finer points

Two-color discipline. Black and white plus brand purple, nothing else. Cheaper to draw, ages better than screenshots, legible at thumbnail size.
The purple is the product. No color appears anywhere until the software does. The hinge panel's glow is the only color in its frame.
Flashback treatment: double frame + sepia shift + corner time tag. Present tense is single frame, cool, no tag except on the return panel.
Date the heroine between rows — don't age her. A two-year flashback doesn't change a face, and an artist who makes it visible has drawn either a different character or a different decade. Signal the gap with circumstance instead: hair, glasses she doesn't need yet, a messier desk. Cheap to draw, and it can't contradict the time tag.
Keep panels free of real UI. The only screen content should be a single line of notification text. A page tied to a screenshot rots when the interface changes. (One deliberate exception: The Corkboard.)

Voice direction Radio only

Must hold

No accent work. Cast for cadence.
A cue names a sound source, or removes one already heard. Never a fact.
Phone voices are never cast — and never run a person through the trombone.
One cameo-shaped hole per episode: a self-contained line, never an exchange.
Credit the cameo in the outro.

Why, and the finer points

Three registers: the two women, plus whoever is narrating. Both leads speak, and on top of that the lead of this case narrates — so the third register isn't Tracy's by right. It belongs to whichever of them the case belongs to, and on a Connie page it is Connie who does the hard-boiled voice-over.

Tracy speaking is precise and clipped — "Drawer." "The second one." "I did not sleep here." Contractions are not the marker — everybody uses those. Bent grammar is: dropped g's, double negatives, regional word order. She uses none of it, and reaches for the uncontracted form when she's being firm — "I did not sleep here," never "I didn't." Narrating is the full hard-boiled performance: a man I would not know if he sat down on me, truly shuffled, on the level, scratch one. The gap between the two is the joke — four words out loud, then a paragraph to the audience.

The performances differ, so cast them apart. Tracy is older, measured, reflective, narrating from a distance. Connie is faster and warmer, closer to His Girl Friday. A listener should know whose case they're in within three words.

But the raid is lexical, never structural. Tracy borrows noir's words and keeps her own syntax, in the room and in narration alike — that's why it's funny, because the doctorate shows through the costume. "Hurtin' nobody" is a dropped g and a double negative: dialect, not jargon, and therefore Connie's. Connie is the one who talks like a person — "they come in bunches, that place," "I'm a liar." Keep them separable by ear; radio has no other way to tell two women apart.
A cue the listener can't hear isn't direction, it's decoration. Radio has two channels — what is heard and what is said — so a slug reading night or September tells the person at the microphone nothing they can act on. If the hour matters, buy it with sound (traffic and a kettle are morning; a radiator and no other footsteps are late) or put it in somebody's mouth. If it can't be bought either way, it didn't matter. Scene slugs therefore name the place and the beat — THE OFFICE, THE TURN, THE CALL — and never the clock or the calendar.

The test that catches the near-misses: a cue must name a thing that makes a noise, or take away one the audience has already heard. No rain now and no copier are legitimate — both played last scene, so their absence registers. Nobody else on the floor is not: it is a fact about the room, and no foley artist can perform it. Say it with what's left making noise instead — a wall clock is only ever audible in an empty office, which is why the clock is the emptiness and needs no sentence explaining that it is.

The comic is the opposite case: a storyboard is written for someone who draws, so time of day, weather and light are exactly the direction an artist needs. Same series, opposite instruction — don't carry a habit across.
No accent. Cast for cadence. The 1940s register for a capable woman was Mid-Atlantic, not New York — a heavy New York accent was class-coded, which is exactly why it attached to the wisecracking-secretary parts. And a full Mid-Atlantic read lands as camp to a modern ear.
The writing already carries the period. Clammed up. Cash in my chips. Nothing good ever turns up at database lock. Layering an accent on top of period diction is doubling the costume — the same error as giving the resolution its own typeface. One channel carries the signal.
Phone voices are never cast. Institutions get the Charlie Brown wah-wah — bureaucracy being unintelligible is the joke. People get a warm indistinct murmur, or silence, with our lead's side carrying the scene. Never run a human being through the trombone.
Characters in the office can be cast — and the guest is who casts it. After the interview, while they're still at the mic, the guest records a cameo that gets dropped into their own episode. It costs ninety seconds, it fills the only remaining voice line item, and a guest who is in the drama shares it far harder than one who was merely on the show.
Every drama needs a cameo-shaped hole. One small voice per episode, written so it can be recorded separately and inserted in post. Never an exchange — a self-contained line only, or the drama can't be finished until the guest records and you lose batch production.
Cast the guest where a flat read is correct. Academics aren't actors, and a wooden delivery in an emotional beat would puncture the scene. Institutional voices can't be got wrong and are funnier: the recorded greeting, the reviewer reading a comment aloud, the person announcing the agenda. A wry bit part works too — the colleague in the hallway, the co-I who says one useless thing.
Credit the cameo in the outro; never hide it. "Dr. Sherry Pagoto appeared as the Voice of the Grants Office." That's the line that gets screenshotted, and an easter egg nobody knows about isn't a prize.

The cases themselves live in the Casebook. Who Tracy and Connie are lives in The Agency and Its Leads. Drawing a single page is the artist brief.