1 T-Rex: You know what would be funny? If this comic did a parody of another, well-known, comic!
2 T-Rex: But do you know what would be tragic?
3 Dromiceiomimus: If, because of hardcoded pixel size limitations, this comic couldn't fit in the full strip format of the comic being parodied?
3 T-Rex: Yes! Silly author! Also:

Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics began 32 days after Irregular Webcomic!, early in 2003. It has, however, achieved greater notoriety and recognition, winning various webcomic awards and levels of popularity I can only drool longingly at. And it does this entirely on the strength of the writing, for Dinosaur Comics uses exactly the same art for every strip.

And you thought I was lazy, using photos instead of drawing art.

Ryan's work deserves the recognition, though. In six panels, he distils the essence of existence and teaches us something about ourselves, while providing laughs along the way. I can only hope to emulate his lofty position in the webcomic pantheon with my unworthiness. And to this end, I am stealing* his artwork and offering my own take on it.

* It's a parody. I'm allowed.**

** Also: I totally asked Ryan if it was okay, and he's cool with it.

---

2015-04-06 Rerun commentary: Actually, there's a bit of a secret here. The size of the comics isn't really hardcoded... any more. It was for a while, and it took me some additional coding work to generalise it to the point where I can now display comic images of any size I want.

It's a bit of a clunky system though - I have to prepare a special file with an HTML snippet in it with the code just to display the image, and title it, for example, special1075.html if it was for this comic. And then I upload that file to the same directory on the web server where the comic image goes. When the automated update occurs, it searches the directory for a special file with the same number as the comic. If it finds one, it uses the HTML snippet in the file to code the image reference. If it doesn't find one, then it generates the standard code for a comic image of size 815×275 pixels.

This is a horrible system, and I really should change it to be much more general, like on newer comics which I've coded up. But it never gets changed, following the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Also, Ryan North is pretty cool, and has also given his blessing to my The Dinosaur Whiteboard project - which accepts reader contributions!