Name: Ralph Black
Occupation: REtired
First Appearance: Cubes 2005 Christmas Card #1

Bio:
Ralph Black founded SeaLeft Software and built up a core group of people to help in the production of quality, custom software. Through the years his eagle instincts allowed the small company to prosper. He is married to the lovely Whitney Black.

With SeaLeft Software well established, Ralph looked forward to his retirement. To that end he mentored Veronica Teyl, the company's marketing director, and passed off more of the day-to-day management duties to her. This culminated in his declaration of semi-retirement, which freed him up to experiment with a variety of pursuits, such as skydiving and motorbike racing.

A serious businessman, Ralph is also a respectable gentleman with a passion for dancing. Ralph has great respect for all those he worked with and easily took their occasional pranks in stride. He chose to sell SeaLeft Software to Ine Industries to help protect the future of his people's careers.

During his semi-retirement, Ralph became friends with Gareth Flect who had an interest in Ralph's project manager Karen Andinus. Ralph invited Gareth and Karen out to his lakeside cabin along with the rest of the SeaLeft staff to give Gareth the opportunity to work out a few difficulties with Karen. Gareth proposed and Karen ultimately accepted. At Karen and Gareth's wedding, Ralph arranged for Karen's parents to contact her through a video feed from the biodome experiment her parents were involved in.

Enjoying his semi-retirement, Ralph went ahead and removed the semi from that title. At that point, Honey Klim had taken over the general manager position at SeaLeft from Veronica Teyl. Ralph still pops by on occasion to see how his former company is doing.

Behind-the-scenes:
Ralph was developed as a character for the Cubes semimonthly strip before the strip started. When the comic began, individual strips were done in a haphazard order (i.e. there was no long term plan for what gags should go where or for when characters should appear). With all the work that was going on as the strip started, a couple of Ralph comics were in production when the 2005 Christmas Card set was created. As a result, it seemed like there was already a strip with Ralph published by the time the cards came out, but this was not the case. This is why Ralph's first official appearance is in the card set, even though he hadn't been introduced in the comic to that point.

In the fourth year of the Cubes Semimonthly series, Ralph announced his semi-retirement from SeaLeft Software. Previously Ralph had always been a very serious businessman, which made it hard to incorporate him into the more frivolous gags involving the other characters. With the torch of responsibility passed, Ralph's character became more informal, which fit better with the general direction of the series and increased his involvement in more strips.