5 Obscure D&W Easter Eggs (Patreon)

We tuck a lot of little winks and nods into D&W, some more well-hidden than others. In fact, some are so discreet - or downright cryptic - that they've flown under the radar for years now. So to extend our 150 backer party, here's just five of D&W's deeper cuts:

Troy's Alma Mater (Chapter 7, Page 4)

Early on in Chapter 7, we see Troy bust out her old college hoodie. You're not going to find Tarnover University in your Fiske Guide, though - for that, you'll need to crack open John Brunner's 1975 proto-cyberpunk classic The Shockwave Rider, where Tarnover is a shadowy government program for recruiting and subverting particularly gifted children. 

Apropos of nothing, The Shockwave Rider is also credited with coining the term "worm."

The Quadro Tracker (Chapter 5, Page 14)

This a blink-and-you'll-miss-it one, but probably one of my personal faves. 

As Troy is being worked over by the local customs goons, one of them scans her luggage with a dubious looking doohickey. The widget with the antenna is actually a Quadro Tracker Positive Molecular Locator, a detection device that went on sale in 1993 with promises that it'd sniff out everything from lost golf balls to plastic explosives at distances of up to 500 miles. Try not to look too shocked when I tell you that it did exactly none of those things - in fact, it wasn't even capable of functioning, period. To quote Wikipedia:

It was merely an empty plastic box in which the only metal parts were a couple of wires and the antenna, which were not connected to each other. (...) The "locator chip" was shown to be equally fake; one example put on display by the FBI contained dead ants that had been frozen and stuck onto paper with epoxy glue.

The scam lasted a good three years, during which around 1,000 Locators were sold to police departments, airports, and schools for up to US$8,000 a pop. And while the brain trust behind Quadro Corp eventually got brought up on mail fraud charges, similar devices have continued to pop up over the decades. 

Form 7AB (Chapter 5, Page 14) 

William Gibson is widely and rightly regarded as the founding father of the cyberpunk movement, but like any author with a long-running publication history, his output's hit a rough patch on occasion. Arguably the roughest was "First Person Shooter", a 2000 X-Files episode in which Agents Mulder and Scully take a break from battling aliens, vampires, bendy men, and Kathy Griffin to get into a digital shootout with an evil VR-based killer secretly modeled after a stripper named (sigh) "Jade Blue Afterglow." Virtual Light it ain't. 

During Troy's equally dramatic battle with Stradanian customs, she's directed to a Form 7AB, Section X13... which coincidentally happens to be "First Person Shooter"'s production  code. 

Ray Lully (Chapter 4, Page 1)

"Obscure" might be a bit of a reach, but four years on from his first appearance, I've yet to see anybody commenting on the fact that Synacon technology guru Ray Lully is explicitly modeled after Cyberpunk RPG creator Mike Pondsmith. So, here you go. That's not the end of it, though: his namesake, Raymond Lully (or Ramon Llull, if you're feeling Catalan), was a 13th century polymath now regarded as one of the pioneers in computation theory. 

Troy's Colleagues (Chapter 4, Page 24)

Troy's co-workers on the sales floor might not play much of a role in the story, but pay close attention to the names Teddy's calling out as he walks the cubes. They're a nod to characters from a wide range of VR-related media, specifically failed '90s series VR.5, The Lawnmower Man, Simulacron-3 (a novel later adapted into sideburnpunk almost-classic World on a Wire), the comic Arcadia, and... yet again, "First Person Shooter."

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As the title hints, this isn't a comprehensive list to every call-out we've snuck into the margins - that would be a far, far longer undertaking - but will hopefully encourage you to poke a bit deeper into the comic. Happy hunting!