TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (BASTICH shakes his fist at his computer screen.) BASTICH: "Buy 3 monogrammed sponges and get the 4th for only $10!" Blast it! Is there NO way to stop the unsolicited JUNK E-MAIL from cluttering my inbox?!
PANEL 2 (Suddenly, EL-KRAHN zooms out of BASTICH's computer chassis in an electric wave.) EL-KRAHN: Greetings, Bastich! BASTICH: GAAH--! El-Krahn, what are you doing in my PC?!
PANEL 3 (EL-KRAHN smiles as he shows a small high-tech gadget to BASTICH.) EL-KRAHN: Merely demonstrating your birthday present from the 23rd century: Your very own Personal Internet Transporter 2295™. It lets you transport yourself to any place with an internet connection!
PANEL 4 (BASTICH takes the gadget as EL-KRAHN explains further.) BASTICH: Cool! How does this thing work? EL-KRAHN: Well, let's just say that by 20th-century standards, it uses very, very, very, very, very, very, VERY advanced technology.
PANEL 5 (EL-KRAN speaks to BASTICH.) EL-KRAHN: It compresses your vital statistics down to only your unique properties to speed up the transfer... For you, that'd be about 23 kilobytes... BASTICH: So I can literally e-mail myself anywhere I want, right? EL-KRAHN: That is correct...
PANEL 6 (BASTICH grabs a baseball bat and steps onto his desk, ready to climb into his computer.) BASTICH: If you'll excuse me... I have some important MAIL to respond to..! Hope they saved some of those sponges...
CREDITS Bastich (c) 1997 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
I was just beginning to be aware of Spam around this time. For years my inbox never really got hit, even with my e-mail address plastered all over the Bastich website, which was linked from a bunch of webcomic lists. Then all of a sudden the dam burst and the golden age of spam was upon us.
The 23-kilobyte figure is a reference to the average filesize of a Bastich strip in GIF format. I took great pains to clean up the text and panel border and slashing the color palate to the bare minimum to achieve this size. Even so, each strip took several seconds to load over typical dial-up in the mid-nineties.
The Personal Internet Transporter would make another appearance a few months later in Summer "Vacation" Part 6 when Bastich learns what's actually at the other end of Spam e-mails.