This strip marks the start of the fifth year of The Greys as a webcomic. Quite honestly we’re surprised to have made it through four years, and even more surprised that we’ve succeeded in keeping to our original schedule of fortnightly strips (we’ve long since given up on the dream of producing weekly comics).
The past four years has seen The Greys appear in print in our local Town Council’s magazine, leading to a newspaper gig for our Monsters, Inked comic, which in turn is now available as a printed collection. We’ve seen visitors to the site grow from single digit figures to thousands each month – with a corresponding increase in our hosting charges (and unfortunately a few cases of the site being shut down when we exceeded our bandwidth). We’ve created over 100 comics, and found new friends from around the world who have been kind enough to translate some of them for us (or in the case of Sam, our French translator, has been incredibly generous enough to have translated all of them!).
So what will Season 5 bring? Much of the same, really. We’ll still be endeavouring to bring you a new Greys strip every fortnight, and Monsters, Inked strips as and when we finish them. We’ll still be parodying all the old sci-fi and cult TV standards that we’ve poked fun at in the past, but we’re always trying to introduce more. And the first half of Season 5 will see a few more Doctor Who parodies as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this British sci-fi institution.
Despite those grandiose ideas, however, we thought we’d just start the season with a good old-fashioned Star Trek joke to coincide with the release of Star Trek Into Darkness.
Cette bande dessinée est aussi disponible en français
This comic is also available in French
Click here to download the SVG source for this comic
[Rep] As the officially elected representative of the Union of Federation Redshirts it is my duty to inform you that my comrades and I are unhappy with the quality of the personal protective equipment provided to us.
After a formal ballot our members have voted to begin industrial action with immediate effect if our demands are not met…
[Rep] One: all security personnel are to be issued with full body armour
Two: the aforementioned body armour is to include a full respiratory system to protect against attacks from sentient gaseous entities
Three: said armour will be in a colour other than red, which we feel prejudices our work by hiding any blood, thus slowing the response from our brothers in the Union of Federation Medical Staff —
— for the same reason our Vulcan members have requested that the body armour should also not be coloured green
[Rep is with the redshirts and has something covered by a cloth in front of him]
[Rep] Comrades, I am delighted to inform you that the management has agreed to all our terms!
With this new body armour we will no longer be the sitting ducks and cannon fodder of the past
[Rep] Tadaa!
[Rep removes the cloth to reveal a Star Wars stormtrooper suit]
Our comics are released under a 
... which requires suitable attribution if you use them...
... and doesn't allow commercial use...
... and requires any derivative works to be released under the same licence.
This symbol indicates an SVG file that you can download and use under this licence
Good luck with Season Five! The new header looks interesting – I’m sure you’ve got something up your sleeves with that.
A funny one. But where’s daisy ? I hope she wasn’t turned to lasagnes…
I’m sure she’ll turn up… she’s just getting changed before she makes her entrance. Besides, we only use horse meat in our lasagnas.
Great, keep em’ coming, we can read ’em! I like the fact that you do all this on open source as well.
Thanks, glad you like them 😀
We also make all the Inkscape source files for The Greys available for download as well (and hide Easter Eggs in each of them). So not only are the comics created using Open Source software, but we also want to encourage people to take our strips apart to learn from what we do – and perhaps to find some extra gags in the process.