I dug out this comic from 2009 as I used it back then to experiment with adding Halftone dot patterns to the comic to emulate what it would like if it were printed in a newspaper. It was way too much work to do on daily basis back then, but it was fun to play with the effect. In 2009, I was drawing the comics in Manga Studio (now Clip Studio Paint) but had to add in the color and shading using Photoshop as Manga Studio at the time was more about B&W manga art than full color comics. When Manga Studio was upgraded to full color support, I stopped using Photoshop. Today, I rarely use Photoshop in the process of creating my comics as Clip Studio can do just about anything Photoshop can as far as comic creation goes. 

The original comic is from November of 2009 (read it by clicking here) while the gang was in California as part of the year-long story arc that I called “Road Trip”. The “Road Trip” started off as a small series of comics that I did in 2007. The 2007 comics are rarely seen as they are just terrible (at least to me). But the idea of doing a story instead of daily jokes was born in 2007 and fully realized in 2009 when I stopped doing the joke-of-the-day type comic and leaned toward telling an overall story of the gang from 1977. I am a storyteller, not a comedy writer. 

And the term Wayback Machine is from “Peabody’s Improbable History” as seen on the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” back in the early ’60s. Mr. Peabody’s machine was actually called the WABAC machine, a play on the name of the UNIVAC computer, the first commercially successful computer introduced in 1951. Trivia: the UNIVAC weighed 8 tons and used over 5,000 vacuum tubes. Imagine having that in your house to browse the internet for goofy webcomics!

Since this is a repeat comic, it possibly falls into the “Second Hand News” category. I also just dig this tune.