So, I’ve got character confusion here. In this strip, Marten is invited to a party by Emily something (see invitation contents), and that Emily is one of Tai’s interns, but is apparently not this Emily, who is also one of Tai’s interns, and is the only Emily-who-is-Tai’s-intern we’ve seen in the strip, and looks totally different. So they aren’t the same person. Right?
Is this a whoosh? That’s the same Emily.
And I think Emily’s last name is Azume.
It’s all the same Emily. Tall, long black hair (it’s just up in a ponytail in 2288), questionable thought processes.
Maybe it’s odd because there isn’t a clear demarcation between days? It goes from a chill Emily with straight hair and a white shirt talking to Momo to a one-off of Angus and Marigold chatting, then to a bouncy Emily with a ponytail and purple shirt talking to Marten. I think the implication with the Marigold one-off is they’re different days.
Liked this strip. The little details and the facial expressions really sold it.
Not a whoosh. The Emily in 2288 doesn’t strike me at all like the Emily in the other strips. Hair, expressions, demeanor. I guess Jeph wooshed me.
Totally the same Emily. And she’s wearing her hair differently, and different clothes, but she looks exactly the same (within the little bit of wiggle room that Jeph’s art tends to insert on that note) in the aspects that people don’t change every day.
I actually have worked on a timeline for the strips for the QC wiki. And Jacques is pretty good about keeping the days straight. One thing that helps is, unlike most comic strip characters, the QC characters wear different clothes.
Weird. I thought one of the bevy of random Smif girls we’d seen, who had wandered by to deliver the invite in 2288. I guess it’s Emily, and she was being extra spunky with Marten because she thinks they’re friends.
I like how Faye has changed out of her tank top and shorts into a bathing suit that is basically a tank top and shorts.
Jacques makes mention of their being animation in a recent strip. But I don’t see it.
I can’t swear to it, but I think it’s the invisible ship’s blur slightly changing in the last panel.
He took it down. It may be archived somewhere, though - but I can’t find it. If you notice in the last panel of this strip, you can see a weird gray “cloud” above Hanners - it’s roughly the shape of a hovering craft. It was blinking in and out of visibility.
Btw, I have never heard of this strip until this thread, so thanks to the OP. 
Be prepared to spend a week cut off from the outside world to get caught up.
Okay. I was thinking it was this but I kept looking and the ship outline never made any apparent change so I assumed it must be something else.
Marten’s collecting quite the harem, isn’t he?
The problem I’m having is that Raven, Hanners, Padma, and Emily all seem to be essentially the same character.
I don’t see that at all. Hannelore and Emily are similar in that they’re both rich girls with no friends, but other than that, all four of them are pretty distinct personalities.
Hmm. If feel like Padma was when she exited, and Emily is still at this point, sketches more than characters, so I can see where they’d feel similar. That said, Hanners and Raven don’t seem like each other at all to me, nor like Emily or Padma.
Aside from being ‘skinny girls’ (‘skinny girls with short hair’, until Emily joined in), the group as a whole doesn’t have much in common.
Hanners’ cultural alien and OCD levels, I suppose puts her in a similar ballpark with Emily’s cloudcuckoolander personality, but it’s hardly a close match.
(And it’s pretty funny to me that the one character who does have a close match to one of them - Dora who is very similar to Padma (which was, of course, a lot of the point) - isn’t on the list.)