[IWC] Moby-**** references early in Martians theme?

[bc56]

I was rereading Irregular Webcomic!, and I noticed a large number of references to Moby-**** early on in the Martians theme.

1: The main character is college student Ishmael Herman, living in Melville Hall at the university.
-Ishmael is the name of the main character of the book.
-The book was written by Herman Melville.
2: Ishmael introduces himself with the line, "Call me Ishmael," which is straight out of the book.
3: Ishmael's cat is white and is named Moby Tom
-Do I really need to explain this?
4: Ishmael is a member of the crew of the spaceship Pequod, hunting the Great White Asteroid which is on a collision course with Earth.
-The ship in the book is called the Pequod
-Moby **** is a great white whale.

Why would the author include these (other than for laughs). Does the motif continue through the theme? (I didn't catch many more. There was something with the "for hate's sake..." line somewhere, but I don't remember who said it.")

[Rockphed]

This is orthogonal to the rest of your thread, but the mods has told us that, when discussing The White Whale we are allowed to call him Moby Dick.

As for including these sorts of things, I think that irregular webcomic was practically all this sort of thing. I think David Morgan Mar was attempting to reach critical joke per comic. He was attempting to incite humor fusion in other words. Or maybe humor fission.

[John Campbell]

Ishmael was originally named by Poll 85. All the other Moby-Dick references fell out of that.