Ninety-nine days. I didn't plan for strip #9 to land on 99 days to go. I counted on the calendar at work on Tuesday and it just did, and I sat there for a minute feeling like the computer was trying to tell me something.

A few of you have written to ask whether Clock likes the Bug. I don't know. I just draw him. Clock has two expressions, and one of them is the other one with the eyes pointed somewhere else. I worked hardest on that last panel, and his face is the one thing I didn't have to draw twice.

The hearts are red, number 17 in the color box. I counted.

-- Cory

NEWS

Friday, September 24, 1999
Strip #9 is up. Next one Monday. Ninety-nine days left, and I've got the rest of the year sketched out on a legal pad behind the register, which my manager thinks is the inventory.

Friday, September 17, 1999
Thank you for all the e-mail about the dial-up strip (#5)! Thirty-one of you wrote in, and twenty-six of you told me about your own slowest download. The winner is a guy in Kansas whose patch took two nights and a phone call from his sister asking why the line was always busy. I read every one of them. The Bug read them too and felt much better.

Thursday, September 9, 1999
BONUS STRIP! It's 9/9/99, which only happens once, so there's a Thursday strip this week (#2). Meet Nines, the Bug's cousin. Some people worried that old programs use 9999 to mean "the end," and that a date full of nines might be the end for a few of them. Nines was counting on it. Regular schedule tomorrow.

Wednesday, September 8, 1999
THE BUG starts today! A new strip every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The strip ends on January 1, 2000, one way or another. Either the Bug pulls it off at midnight or he doesn't, and either way the last strip goes up on New Year's Day. If the power's out, it goes up when the power comes back.

ABOUT THE STRIP AND ME

My name is Cory Rourke. I'm 24, I live in Dayton, Ohio, and I work the counter at a used computer store. All day long I tell people that yes, a 486 will still run Windows 95, it just won't be in any hurry about it.

THE BUG takes place inside my computer. Not a computer like mine. My computer: the beige 1994 486 DX2/66 on my desk, the one I'm drawing on right now. It was sitting in the back room at the store with a sticky note on it that said "AS IS," and my manager let me have it for nothing if I'd stop asking. It has 16 megs of RAM, a 14.4 modem, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a battery on the motherboard that keeps the clock going when it's off. I opened it up one night to blow the dust out, and I looked at the chips standing around on the green board like little buildings, with that coin battery in the middle like a water tower, and I thought: somebody lives in here.

The Bug is the Y2K bug. He's going to make the clock say 1900 at midnight on New Year's Eve. He has big plans and a lot of nerves. Clock is the system clock and he is not impressed. Floppy is a disk who's seen some things. Meet them all on the cast page.

I'll be honest with you. I sell computers for a living, I know all the reasons it's going to be fine, and I still bought two cases of water. That's sort of what the strip is about.

HOW I DRAW IT

Every strip is drawn in MS Paint, on the 486 the strip is about. That's it. No scanner, no tablet, no fancy program. Here's how one gets made:

1. I set up a blank picture 400 pixels wide and draw the four panel boxes with the rectangle tool.
2. I zoom in to 2x and do everything up close. Outlines with the pencil, the line and the ellipse tools. The Bug is one ellipse plus a lot of patience. Clock is a rectangle with opinions.
3. I color it with the fill bucket. If there's one gap in an outline, the bucket finds it and floods the whole panel green, so I've learned to close my lines.
4. Colors: the 28 colors in Paint's color box and nothing else, plus one custom color I mixed for my own face. Paint's light yellow made me look like a lemon.
5. Lettering with the text tool, all capitals, then a white balloon drawn around the words, and a tail pointing at whoever's talking.
6. Save it as a GIF and send it up to GeoCities.

About two hours a strip, more when there's a closet full of canned goods in it. Strip #6 took me a whole Thursday night.

COMICS I READ EVERY MORNING

I read these before I open the store. If you like THE BUG, you'll like these more.

• User Friendly -- a daily strip about the staff of a small Internet service provider. I read it first, every single day, before the coffee's done.

• Sluggy Freelance -- Torg, Riff, Zoë and Bun-Bun, who is a mini-lop rabbit with a switchblade. That's all I'm going to tell you. Go find out.

• PvP -- the staff of a computer gaming magazine, which sounds to me like the best job in the world.

• Penny Arcade -- two guys and video games, three times a week. Three times a week, like me, which I'm choosing to take as a sign.

• Kevin & Kell -- a rabbit married to a wolf, and it's been going since 1995. Proof you can keep a comic going on the Web for years.

LINK TO THE BUG

Want to put THE BUG on your links page? Thank you! Here's a button. Please right-click it, pick Save Picture As, save it as thebug.gif and put it on your own page instead of loading it off mine. Then paste in this:

<a href="/SiliconValley/Monitor/7618/">
<img src="thebug.gif" width="88"
height="31" border="0"
alt="THE BUG"></a>

Drop me a line when you do and I'll come take a look.