Sorry for the delay with the comic this morning. We had a little database hiccup after trying to clean house on our server a little bit. But we’re back now! Welcome!

Originally I was going to have Tom “transform” into manga style and have Jared’s reaction be very muted. Like it was nothing new. Then I thought, “This would be kind of shocking” and changed Jared’s reaction appropriately. Eventually, I just decided to go whole hog with the concept and push it into the luducris areana. Sometimes it’s just fun to end a strip randomly. Plus, I kind of wanted to see what a fully blown manga Tom and Jared might look like.

Incidentally, today’s strip owes a great deal to this clip from Clerks: The Animated Series

“Bear driving car? How can that be?!”

Not too much more for me to say about Speed Racer, so I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

Oh! Regarding the clean house we were performing this week. Something I noticed in the comic archive is that the last few comics have been TWICE their normal size. Not in their dimensions, but in the amount of background information in the image. Basically I was outputting them for web at the highest possible resolution. So instead of a comic that was about 80k to 100k being downloaded to your browser, the comics were anywhere between 160k and 200k. In some cases 250!

I know that this is less and less of a problem in a digital environment where DSL and high speed connections are more common. But for those of you on slower connections who noticed the site was dragging in the last few weeks… well, that was the reason why.

I’ve since reformatted those comics, so hopefully you should notice a pick up in performance if you’re browsing through the archives.

That’s it for today! Thanks for checking in and we’ll see you here on Friday!