Seems Jeff has met his match as the landlord vs. tenant game begins! Thus ends my four-part homage to the original comics from 2008. So, next week will be the cover for the first story of the rebooted comic as we get ready for the band to take shape. A bit of foreshadowing in the first two panels as we see that Bud has a “Plan 9 from Outer Space” poster on his wall.

One of the reasons I rebooted the comic was that little themes like this got lost the first time around. In the early comics Bud and Jeff butted heads for a bit, but I never kept it around as a recurring theme. I did bring it up in the original “Back to School” storyline, but it was gone after that. For example, in “Calvin & Hobbes” the building of snowmen happened several times a year as well as Space Man Spiff episodes. I’ve gathered up all of these little themes that popped up now and then in the original comics, but never were heard from again.

I also intend to keep the fantasy elements like the Mystic Frog, Ms. Devil, the Further Adventures of Agent B.U.D., and of course, transforming Bud. I’ll dip into these periodically but not so often as to become annoying.

This beer song by the Youth of Britain has been on my radar since the comic started 17 years ago. I just never could figure out how to use it here. My first idea was to do a bunch of drawings of the gang drunk and edited into a video, but I never had the energy to draw that many images to fill up a 3 minute video. But with the original comics retired (for now) I can go back and revisit that idea as I know I have more than a few images of the gang drink and/or in bars.