The Greys

Compared with most of our recent comics this one might seem a little simplistic, and the joke a bit on the old side. But If you listen carefully you should hear the classic strum of a harp to indicate that we’re about to enter a flashback…

The year is 1996. Windows 95 has been out for a few months, and although it’s generally been received as a vast improvement over Windows 3.1, some people find that it crashes or hangs from time to time. Thumbing through our existing comics, we come across the very first Greys strip that we drew (sadly now lost in its digital form, and only existing as a printout):

(Yes, this is where The Greys all started. Bonus points for understanding the joke – it might help to imagine yourself watching sci-fi back in the mid-nineties)

So we took some of the elements from that first strip, moved them and tweaked them a little (don’t look surprised – you know that’s how we create most of our comics), and produced “Crash!” to honour the growing pains of Windows.

Now as the strumming harp and wobbly fade brings us back to the 21st century, you might be wondering why it’s taken so long for this comic to go online. It actually fell into the group of old comics that we converted for use on the new site two years ago, and was originally intended to be the second comic we posted. At the time we had a bright idea for an Easter Egg to go with it, but unfortunately we found that web technology was still a little immature for what we had in mind. Two years later and things have progressed significantly and finally, a couple of weeks ago, the launch of Firefox 4 brought the technology we need to the masses. At last the Easter Egg would be visible to more than just a handful of Opera users. It still won’t work in Internet Explorer though, not even IE9. Maybe in another couple of years…

Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French

Questo fumetto è disponibile anche in italiano
This comic is also available in Italian

Click here to download the SVG source for this comic