PANEL 1 (Title panel. Bastich's arm is visible as he runs off-panel to the right.) TITLE: The Bastich, by Hart BASTICH: I'm fraggin' late again!
PANEL 2 (Bastich and Hacker-Lad sitting at school desks in a classroom.) HACKER-LAD: Bastich..! Late for class again, I see! BASTICH: Shadupp, Hacker-Lad! I really tried this time!
PANEL 3 (CU Bastich) BASTICH: I even went so far as to set my alarm clock ahead five minutes so I'd get here early. But then my roommate Mr. "All-Clocks-On-The-Premises-Must-Be-Synched-With-The-Bell-Tower", switched it back without telling me!
PANEL 4 (CU Hack-Lad) HACKER-LAD: That's too bad, man! But it doesn't explain why you're TEN minutes late! What happened to the other five?
PANEL 5 (CU Bastich scratches his head.) BASTICH: Ten minutes..? Really..? Lemme see...
PANEL 6: (MS Bastich lifts up a dismembered arm and looks at a watch on the arm's wrist.) BASTICH: Hey, you're right! I wonder, where did all the time go?
CREDITS The Bastich (c) 1995 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
This was the very first BASTICH strip ever! It was drawn in Photoshop 3.x (using the line tool and fill bucket) on an old Macintosh during my Helpdesk shift at ECST (Chico State's College of Engineering, Computer Science & Technology). After this one, I switched to scanning hand-drawn artwork and finishing in Photoshop.
One might notice the terrible image quality in the strips, and this was an intentional tradeoff starting from this very first strip. Most of the world was still connecting to the internet via dial-up, so I made it a goal to keep each strip under 30 kilobytes. The first few were initially saved as JPEG, and I eventually switched everything to GIF because it's better at compressing line art and I could save even more bytes by slashing the color palette. There are still hints of JPEG artifacts in the strips that were later converted to GIF because I didn't hold onto full-res working copies in the early days. Side trivia: For a while only GIFs could be embedded in a web page, and JPEGs would be opened to an external viewer. IIRC, one of Netscape's biggest innovations over Mosaic (other than the
<blink>tag) was to support embedded JPEGs. But I still used GIFs for these strips for the reasons above.Hacker-Lad was, of course, based visually on a real person. Everyone in my corner of the Chico State Computer Science scene knows who's who in this cartoon world.
This joke was much darker than the tone I would eventually settle into. There's usually not a lot of maiming in my humor, even off-panel. I did (and still do) appreciate edgy/black humor, but my own imagination steers more toward the harmlessly absurd.