ANDREW FARAGO WRITES: This wraps up the week’s worth of Narbonic fill-in strips that I did. My lettering’s not too bad in that last panel, and I managed some pretty expressive faces, so that’s good. I’m a little bit better at drawing now, as seen in my current comic, The Chronicles of William Bazillion, which updates every Wednesday. Check your local listings for the time and channel.

I think the big exaggeration here is the notion that I would’ve spent nine full hours reading the most popular webcomics earlier this decade. There were only about four strips online at the time, and two of them were just that screen saver with the toaster that had wings on it.

Y’see, at the time, my impression of webcomics was that the most popular strips, apart from Shaenon’s comic, consisted of slick drawings that were cut-and-pasted over and over again because of lazy artists; vapid, large-breasted women; video game references; crude drawings and bad coloring; Star Wars references in place of actual punchlines or insight into the human condition or actual comedy; with clumsy usage of computer fonts instead of the much superior and artistic hand-lettering.

I’m glad to see that things have changed, and that the most popular strips today are…

Uh…let’s see what’s on the next page, shall we?

Oh, right. The other popular strips seemed to be about animal girls, and how attractive they are.

Was I watching some completely different version of Rescue Rangers than everyone else in the world when I was a kid?

Ahh…the big payoff.

I dig what I did in panels one and three, but went a bit overboard with my limited Photoshop skills toward the end of this one.

And here’s the payoff. One of many, many, many things that I’ll have to apologize to Chuck Jones for if I ever run into him in the afterlife.

The background in panel five contains a poster for a Tom Tomorrow exhibition that had taken place at the Cartoon Art Museum in the late 1990s, a sampling of comics that were on our bookshelf in 2002, and a large sketch by Keith Knight that is still in our apartment, although it’s mostly hidden behind a bookshelf these days.

The most factually inaccurate scene in this whole comic is in the final panel, as Shaenon NEVER draws at our drawing table. She mostly uses that space for staging Civil War re-enactments using her My Little Ponies and Battle Beasts.

As the fact that I’m writing this commentary at 1:30 in the morning on my day off tells you, Shaenon still exerts a great deal of control over me.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to massage Shaenon’s neck and feed her some bon-bons before she gets cranky.