Two chunks of exposition are in panel one, each for a different purpose.  The first one, obviously, is to remind even regular readers how Leslie’s Robin-Smooch works, just to make sure we’re all still on the same page.  Often folks would just pop in for the one-off gags and leave for the storylines!  And I was expecting a few folks who’d never read Shortpacked! but were here for the It’s Walky! content to show up, and thus this’d help them out as well.

Now, Ultra Car’s first-panel exposition is the wild bit.  Like, she’s describing an event that happened behind a subscription paywall.  There were probably maybe two hundred people in the world who read that story.  This whole idea of doing a sequel to a subscription-only Joyce and Walky! storyline was friggin’ nuts, and I knew it was nuts, and I was gonna do it anyway.  But I still needed to give people some basic info, just to make it slightly less nuts.  Like, take maybe 10% off the top of the quantity of nuts.

The rest of the strip is even more exposition, but it’s of the This Is What We’re About To Do variety.  Just scooch all this obligatory text outta the way all at once.