I’ve got a tentacle for an arm.
on October 3, 2018 at 12:01 amWhoof, it was rough recreating this particular strip. The original Keenspot site allowed you to stack multiple images so long as they were in alphabetical order, and so I just had like five pieces of artwork, each separated by a graphic image that was really just a thin, tall line. But for WordPress I gotta combine it all into a super image. It’s probably not a great filesize, and I don’t want to go look to see what it is.
Also I didn’t have high-res files to create this strip back in 2003, either, so I recreated a few of them from the new, larger comic sizes so it didn’t look artifacted as hell. The bit with Walky and Joyce walking at night is from the new coloring.
I tried to choose some random panels here as the universe hemorrhaged, but two of them were definitely not random. I wanted to push the red herring for The Cheese’s original identity a bit more assertively. Can you catch it???
And the second panel with Joe is, surprise, a nod towards College Roomies from Hell!!!. Joe is drawn in its style, and he has a tentacle arm just like that universe’s Mike.
but the floating cow clipart may just be my favorite part
even more than Jason continuing to be a fish in the Merwalky panel
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Panels 2 and 3 are references to other old-timey webcomics, aren’t they.
Panel 3 is a reference to THIS old-timey webcomic!
I checked for you. It’s 1.1 megs. Youch!
Ow my modem!
Under ideal conditions, it would only take 2 minutes 45 seconds on 56k, or 6 seconds on DSL.
It’s not really that big a deal on the modern Internet, but I still think web images should be under a megabyte just out of principle.
Hey I’m happy if modern sites can keep their Javascript under a meg.
…dina?
I forgot how weird the layout of this strip was and was wondering if it hadn’t loaded right for a moment there. Then I checked the old version.
BTW, you can see some faint lines around what used to be the second image.
Is it just me or is this color style more like early Shortpacked than standard IW coloring? Or am I forgetting something?
I mean the Drama Tag’s reality warping powers are rather like The Cheese’s.
It looks like the Intact Drama Tag universe to me.
The Cheese returns most things to normal, but Walky keeps his thong.
There was a innuendo joke in here somewhere.
I spent five minutes looking for the clip art cow, wondering how I could have missed it, yet unable to find it. It didn’t even occur to me to look for a silhouette. **sigh**
Frankly, on my original read-through, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that the Cheese had an identity other than giant alien god-robot.
I feel dumb but I still dunno what the red herring is X_X
The panel with Dina and then, the Cheese repeating her “indeterminate technology” phrase were meant to hint that the Cheese is Dina, I’m guessing.
Or the cape on Danny.
That’s not Danny, that’s Joyce.
Nah, Jason’s just playing koi, that’s all.
Ha.
Hmmmm, so the red herring was Dina as the Cheese? I thought it was Sal as the Cheese….
so confused…
😛
The Cheese is a cow, because cheese comes from milk comes from cows. Panel 1 is the origin of the company Tucows. Panel 3 is the meaning of life.
So, the red herring was Dina, wasn’t it?
That aside, is The Cheese about to press the Reset Button and leave everyone with a hell of a headache and phantom memories of several hours that never happened?
[SPOILERS]
I think that the problem with the Cheese’s identity is that until this point, only the author knew that he was a time traveler of sorts. If I ever thought that there was someone inside the Cheese, I wouldn’t have thought of a present or past character.
yeah, that was pretty much my issue, too. I didn’t think that he might have a secret identity with in-universe significance, and I certainly didn’t consider whether it might be a space-time traversing version of someone we’d heard of
Lots of tags missing here
OH JEEZ the end is coming surprisingly soon.
For some reason it bothers me that when everything was reset to normal Walky and Joyce switched clothes. Like, the clothes weren’t part of the whole gender shift, they were disguises they picked up later, so I feel like they should have stayed the same. It would have been harder to display that their genders had switched back given the limits of the art style, I suppose. (I bet you thought the complaints would be related to reinforcing gender stereotypes, didn’t you?)
Your comment made me realise that given their relative positions in the last few strips and the fact that the clothes remained with the appropriate gender, the way the universe may have self-corrected was by turning Walky into Joyce and Joyce into Walky.
Of course, when they were first zapped, their SEMME clothing adjusted to their new body types as well. After all, Joyce’s original clothes would have been way too small for the tall dude she became. I think I just wrote it off as “the rules are fuzzy”.